Category: Essays

All of these essays come from Medium.com. I decided to do a separate post for this site because I can’t directly link to all the articles. But I can link to the writers and you can look around, after joining Medium, and check out their other writings, as well. There are a few of these articles that sit behind a paywall, but its only five dollars a month, if you’re willing. Later, I’ll do a separate list of essays for fans on Tumblr.

Black Panther: The King For Our Time

Lessons for America on the Consequences of Isolationism and Burying your Violent History Jay Kapoor

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Meditations on ‘Black Panther’ and the Future of Black Superhero Movies: Why did it succeed where many other black superhero movies have failed?

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Black Panther: Lessons in Hollywood diversity and black pride

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‘Black Panther’: When Will African-American Films No Longer be Considered Unicorns?

After a string of seemingly anomalous box-office hits (‘Get Out,’ ‘Girls Trip’ and now Marvel’s latest), THR columnist Marc Bernardin argues that these hits can be repeated if Hollywood pays attention to the real reasons they succeeded in the first place.

An American Monster In Wakanda: Why I Would Be Erik Killmonger Talynn Kel

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Just another collection of interesting items that came across my dashboard.

Best Insult on Tumblr:

“You Uncultured Common Fly!”

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*Putting this here:

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This is a beautiful collection of information, and images from the movie Coco. This movie did as well in Mexico as Black Panther did in the US. I haven’t yet seen it, but when I finally do, I’ll know what to look for. The writers (and I believe many of the animators themselves), are Mexican. This is why it’s so important for people of other cultures to write their own stories. They know their stories and audiences better than anyone. And its just a wonderful cache of information, and had I seen the movie first, most of it, would’ve gone right over my head.

By now, you’ve probably heard Coco is one of the most well researched films about Mexico and its culture. There are many small details that make it feel like Mexico: the stone roads in a small town, the traditional embroidery patterns in the shirts of Miguel’s female relatives, an uncle wearing a soccer team shirt, even a bowl of limes in a stand of aguas frescas. Of course, the looks of papel picado, day of the dead altars, and cemeteries are also well represented. The clothes of the relatives Miguel sees in the world of the dead is accurate to their eras. While these are a nice touch, you’re ultimately not missing out on anything by not spotting them, so in this post I wanted to talk about the more culturally based details that show the most research and you might not understand if you’re not very well acquainted with Mexican culture:

Names and pronouns

1. Coco

This one is the most straightforward, so let’s start with the name of the movie. While the protagonist is called Miguel, we soon learn that Coco is his great grandmother. “Coco” is what we call a woman called “Socorro” (lit. “help” – it’s a very traditional name that’s considered old fashioned).

The Rivera family calls her “Mamá Coco,” which means “Mother Coco.” They also call Imelda “Mamá Imelda,” and so on. Calling your grandparents “mamá” or “papá” instead of “abuelita” and “abuelito” is a thing you can do, though I can’t say how common it is.

In the Spanish version of the film, Miguel’s grandmother, Elena, talks to Mamá Coco with “usted” (I didn’t notice other instances, but they might be there). Spanish has a formal and an informal version of singular “you:” “usted” for formal, “tú” for informal. The verb conjugation also changes depending on which one you use. It is used differently all through the Spanish speaking world, but in Mexico, other than older people you respect (like a teacher), you can talk to older family members with “usted,” which means respect rather than the distance the formality might imply. Nowadays, it has fallen out of use: as someone born in the 90s, my grandparents talked to their parents almost exclusively with “usted;” out of my parents, my mother talked to hers with “usted” and my father with “tú;” I speak to my parents with “tú.” I have cousins on my mother’s side that talk to their parents with “usted,” but I would say that makes them a minority nowadays.

Traditions and beliefs

2. Crossing to the world of the dead on a bridge of marigolds

If you paid very close attention, you might have noticed two children scattering marigold petals on the ground and their mother telling them not to scatter them, but to make a bridge so the dead could cross over. It was easy to miss, but that’s actually something we believe!

There are several types of flowers you can place in a day of the dead altar, but the one you can’t do without is the yellow marigold. Its petals are scattered all around the altar, and at the very front, you’ll form a path surrounded with candles. The bright yellow will help the dead properly make their way to the altar, and the candles surrounding the path will light their way.

3. Crossing to the world of the dead with a xoloitzcuintli

Several prehispanic cultures had a similar concept of the underworld as many other cultures around the world, in which there was a river they had to cross to get there. For both the Aztecs/Mexicas and the Mayas, a xoloitzcuintli would guide their souls so they could cross the river safely and arrive to Mictlan (Mexicas) or Xibalba (Mayas). To achieve this, a xoloitzcuintli would be sacrificed and buried with its owner. Day of the dead altars can have a xoloitzcuintli figure so that the dead can make it back safely as well.

4. Being thrown into a cenote

My screenshot isn’t the best but at some point, Miguel is thrown into a big pit with water. That’s not just any random pit, but a cenote.

Cenotes are naturally ocurring sinkholes caused by the collapse of limestone. The word “cenote” has Maya etymology, as cenotes are commonly found in the Yucatán peninsula, where they (still!) live. In old times, they would sacrifice animals and people as tributes to the gods, and also throw ceramic objects and jewelry as part of the tribute.

5. Alebrijes

I left these for last because they don’t have any deep meaning. Alebrijes are colorful fantastic animals that a man called Pedro Linares saw in a fever dream. He was a skilled artisan, so when he woke up from his long sickness, he brought them to life in his art.

In Coco, alebrijes are spiritual guides, and while their designs are to the likes of the real alebrijes, the film actually gave them a more important role than they have for us.

Music

6. Genres of Mexican music

The songs in Coco all belong to genres we’ve grown up with, so even if someone isn’t that knowledgeable in music theory or genres, we could vaguely tell they sounded “Mexican” (some more than others). Someone who is more knowledgeable of music genres can help me out here, but I think:

(As I sleep
I dream of us close together
Going towards a blue sky
But when I wake up
The sky red, I am missing you)

Within the universe of the movie, this would make it an anachronistic reference, though. Additionally, Cielo rojo is a song of loss and Un poco loco is about a woman who thinks very differently and likes to say everything backwards, and that makes him crazy (in a good way!). Hence, in English we’ve got her saying to put his shoes on his head instead of his feet, and in Spanish him saying she might think with her feet and also how she keeps playing with his thoughts. Cielo rojo is a pretty sad song.

7. La Llorona

And I purposefully left La Llorona out of that list (it’s originally a son istmeño, though).

There’s a full musical number in Spanish, which seems to have suprised some people. For those of us who watched Coco in Spanish, it wasn’t too hard to guess it was this one: La Llorona was likely left in Spanish because it’s a very old folk song, one of those that are so old it has no known author and there are many different versions of the lyrics.

“Llorona” just means “weeper,” which is not really as unusual of a word in Spanish as it is in English. It’s closer to “crybaby” in use. If you’re curious, the version used in Coco says the following, with “llorona” being the singer herself:

Poor me, llorona, llorona dressed in sky blue
Even if it costs me my life, llorona, I won’t stop loving you
I climbed the highest pine tree to see if I could spot you
Since the pine tree was so green, llorona, it cried upon seeing me cry

What is grief and what is not grief, llorona: it all is grief to me
Yesterday, I was crying to see you, llorona; today, I’m crying because I saw you

Famous people

Remember how I said Remember Me is a bolero ranchero? Guess who we associate boleros rancheros with?

That would be Pedro Infante, who happens to have a strong resemblance to no other than Ernesto de la Cruz.

It’s probably not a coincidence at all, as later on we see Ernesto with Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete at his party. Ernesto de la Cruz was explicitly stated to be inspired on both of them and another singer of the same genres, Vicente Fernández.

She does have a rather prominent role so she’s hard to miss. For those unaware, Frida is the artist who made the flaming papaya.

The themes in Frida’s are autobiographical, as she had a rather unusual life due to polio and injury. She painted herself and her suffering a lot. That might be why we get performances with many Fridas and things like a crying cactus that’s herself.

Bonus: her husband, Diego Rivera, is also in the same studio where we meet Frida. He was an important artist, specifically a muralist.

10. Other Mexican celebrities

I already brought up Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete as characters that appear right beside Ernesto de la Cruz.

But we also get to see a cameo of many other famous Mexican names in Ernesto’s studio! Excluding the people at the piano, from left to right:

Another bonus: this gal looks like the calavera garbancera / the Catrina illustrated by José Guadalupe Posada.

There might be more things I’m missing or forgot; if that’s the case, feel free to let me know! You can also fix my music genres for me since that’s never been my forte.

I hope this was of interest to someone!

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*Frankie Trixx came across my dashboard, and I totally fell in love with him. I was just in tears. Now, its my understanding that this guy isn’t actually from Africa. I believe he’s Canadian, but he has an African name, and this is one of his Instagram personas. He is absolutely hilarious though, and has a lot to say about everything. Here, he discusses unseasoned chicken:

The real comedy here, outside of Quinta’s dancing, is her boyfriend’s facial expressions. He was not ready!

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*As a parallel to my calls for diversity in commenters and reviewers, there is a call for people within fandom to step up their game, to be sensitive to media that is for, and by, Black Americans, and any media that holds special emotional, or religious resonance, or speaks on internal issues within our communities. Don’t write fanfic, or create fanart, or meta, without a thorough understanding of what you’re creating. Do your research. Listen to Black fans discussing how the movie affects them, and read, read, read! (The same goes for media that features other poC, and their cultures.)

You might leave the theater super jazzed and wanting to write meta and fic about how beautiful Wakanda is, how badass the Dora Milajae are, or who the real villains might be and why, or over that little cameo at the end (no spoilers). And you’re not wrong – but if you’re white, pump the brakes on that feeling for a few days.

There’s a lot to take in, about Black Panther. It’s an intricate, incredibly well thought-out movie that covers a lot of ground in terms of thorny and important themes. It stares right in the face of generational trauma, the legacy of slavery, conflicts between the diaspora and Africans and what responsibilities and connections each feel to each other, how colonization continues today under different names, and on and on.

And you’re gonna be missing the context for a lot of that. So hit pause on that content creation for a little bit, okay?

There’s a lot of meta, fic, thought posts, personal experiences, and resources already being shared by Black fans. There’s gonna be a lot more. Take the next few days to read them. Get lost reading up on the historical and cultural touchstones that the movie draws from. Follow Black fans and reblog their stuff. Listen before you hit post on that fic or meta.

And maybe you don’t end up posting it at all. Maybe you learn the context of the characters and issues and history you saw up on screen, and that great idea you came out of the theater with seems more and more like a hot take. That’s okay. It’s totally fine just to listen.

I’m not saying that white people aren’t allowed in the Black Panther fandom. I’m not saying that only Black people can write Black Panther fic. First, that would be incredibly hypocritical of me; and Second, I think that white people not putting in the effort to humanize non-white people literally makes us worse human beings.

What I’m saying is, if you wanna do it: it’s worth putting in the work. Not just to create content that isn’t full of microaggressions and outright racism, but participation means you have to put in the work to do it right. If you’re not willing to wait, and listen, and learn, and work – then just don’t.

Well evening me might have fallen asleep at a reasonable hour if that dumbass afternoon me hadn’t lain down for a “little nap” that lasted four hours.

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*I love this woman’s clapback. I know we called a moratorium on inviting various White people to the cookout after Trump, but really, this is how you ally.

As a general rule, I don’t give one flying hot damn about who some random Black guy is fucking, but if you feel the need to scandalize my name, (i.e. Black women) to justify who you’re fucking, the problem is not us. The problem is your insecurity about who you’re fucking. There’s no need to put us down to declare your love of White women, and Liv was correct to put these men in heir place:

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This right here…MOOD!!!

This Lovecraftian monstrosity may look like an amalgam of dying octopuses, but it’s actually a single creature called a Basket Star, a type of deep sea brittle star. They can reach up to 11 pounds in weight and 70 cm in length!

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*Yeah, there’s a reason why people didn’t rally around Catwoman the way they did around Black Panther, and it has nothing to do with disliking Black women. The movie was just shit. Even I checked the fuck out halfway through it. When even the movie’s own writers realize the movie was shit, well..

Also Catwoman had nothing whatsoever to do with the culture. It was essentially culture-less, which is how all Black characters are, when written by non-Black writers. The only White director I’ve ever come across, who got it right, was Steven Spielberg, and I suspect his being Jewish informed a lot of what he did on The Color Purple. (Not even Tarantino gets it right, even though I liked Django Unchained.)

I feel like people are making unfair comparisons to other movies, when really the only movie that comes close to doing what Black Panther has done, is the 1998 Blade movie. It had a couple of Black cultural moments in it, but that had more to do with its star, Wesley Snipes, than the director Stephen Norrington.

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*I’m obviously gonna have to do another post on this show. I love this show. It’s like a weekly Luke Cage/Black Panther fix. But really, what I like about all these different Black stories, isn’t just the primarily black cast, but how they truly represent the individuality of our culture, how different they all are, in style and flavor. Atlanta, is a very different type of comedy than Black*ish, or Insecure. Black Lightning feels very different than Black Panther or Luke Cage. They’re all telling very different types of stories.

Below: The Iconic Thunder Foot Stomp! straight out of the comic books. You have nan idea how loud my Mom and I were whooping and hollering, during these scenes.!

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And finally I want to introduce all of you to Shaina West, also known as THE SAMURIDER, a tiny stuntwoman doing her own thing on Youtube.

*Since this movie blew up the theaters there have been a metric ton of think-pieces and examinations about it. I’ve tried to collect as many of these as I thought were interesting, leaving out all the contrarian negative stuff. I know I promised to write a review, but there’s nothing I would say in it that isn’t already covered by the three lists of think pieces I’ve collected. (Maybe later, I’ll jot something down about my feelings for the various characters or something.)

*But first up, I thought this essay was related to the idea of Wakanda having never been colonized, versus how we are all taught by popular media to think of the continent of Africa. You can read this first ,and then play a drinking game of how many times the writers do these things in the following articles:

Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

*I didn’t agree with this review but I’m including it here because some of you will find it interesting, and the author does make other salient points. I have to admit, I was a bit taken aback by the depiction of the lone African American in the movie. I was deeply saddened by Killmonger, while agreeing with much of his philosophy. I get why he was angry. I was also saddened by the fate of the only African American woman in the entire film, and I wish the director had put more thought into it. I get the point he’s trying to make, but it still felt pretty bad to watch that point being made.

Dear Fellow White People: Go See “Black Panther” – Medium.com

Here are six reasons. Do it this weekend. Seriously, just go.

*This article is about people who are trolling the movie. As the movie began to take off last weekend, there were a number of alt-right trolls who posted fake tweets demonising the movie’s fans, and claiming that white people had been beaten up at theaters.

I put this here to point out the utter futility of their efforts in trying to disparage and destroy this movie. Their efforts will always meet with failure, not because they’re awful, (because yeah, they are) but because, by the time they are resorting to efforts to sabotage these movies, it’s already too late. These acts are purely defensive, and only illustrate how little control such people have over mainstream media.

All they have in their arsenal to combat progress is more of the same lies and vitriol against black people that they’ve always espoused. Their messages are not new, and not effective.

*Not all of these essays were written by Black reviewers, but even so, I thought the reviewer, regardless of race, had interesting things to say about the philosophies of, and psychology behind, the film’s characters. Just becasue White reviewers can’t (or won’t) talk about race, doesn’t mean they have nothing worthwhile to say on other topics.

One of the best things about #BlackPanther was definitely the women. Shuri, our princess is cheeky, charming and a fcking genius. Okoye could kill me and I’d gladly thank her. If I have even an ounce of Nakia’s compassion, I would be a better woman that I am now.

*Everyone wants to know everything about the making of Wakanda, and Ruth Carter’s major influences on her designs for the film.

Ruth Carter is a Hollywood costume designer who grew up in Springfield. Her career spans a long list of major motion pictures, and she is best known for her work on Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X” and Steven Spielberg’s “Amistad,” receiving Academy Award nominations for both films. Carter’s most recent work can be seen in “Selma,” a film about the trio of marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965.

“The PanAfrican flag is red, black and green, so when you see Okoye, T’Challa and Nakia in their covert looks, you’re seeing the PanAfrican flag.” – Ryan Coogler, director of Black Panther.

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Oh, yeah. The hair thing:

The Fans:

*This essay was originally written as a response to Beyonce’s Lemonade but many of the writer’s arguments can be equally applied to any media that is made by, and speaks to, a Black audience, including Black Panther.

He does not like superhero movies and normally he falls asleep in the cinema. But not this time, he was on the edge of his seat and he said that he didn’t wanna miss a single moment. He absolutely loved the movie, the first thing he did when we got home was to call his african friend, yelling at him to go watch it as soon as possible. The second thing he did was ask me when the sequel will be out.

I asked my dad what he liked about the movie and he said everything. He loved that almost everyone was black and that they spoke Xhosa. He was so happy that they captured what life is actually like in many african cities in those scenes when they were walking around in wakanda. Seeing the people sit in cafes, buying food from food stands, kids running around with school bags, just people living their everyday life all the while being unapologetically african. He said he felt as if he was back home. And he was so happy that there finally was a movie where africans weren’t starving, or warlords, or dealing drugs. He told me that this is the kind of movie he has wanted to see for years, not alluding to the superhero stuff but the fact that they portray africans the same way that most if not all movies portray white people and not criminalize or dehumanize them but uplifting them. He loved every single character and especially M’Baku but his absolute favourite was the Queen mother Ramonda because she was so calm and collected while simultaneously being this strong queen. My dad, coming from a culture that really uplifts and value mothers and holds them above all, felt like the movie really captured that in Ramonda and that’s why he loved her.

He loved the soundtrack and how they mixed in djembe drums and traditional african singing with modern western music and he loved the costumes because a lot of the clothes look like the things people are wearing at all the african parties we go to.

The only complaint my dad had was that the sound was to high, which was his own fault for insisting that he sit at the end of the row right next to one of the speakers.

So yeah, representation do matter. I’ve never in my life seen him so happy about a movie. And he wanted to talk about it after it had ended which never happens normally. We joked around with the idea of him being a wakandan wardog stationed here and we did Shuris and T’Challas little handshake saying that is the only way we will now greet other africans. This movie gave my dad pure joy and happiness and it gave us a bonding opportunity because we finally have something that we both could geek out about.

After Black Panther, and Coco, and all the other great films that have come out and boasted great representation (and great Box Office returns) I hope all movie studios are aware that nothing can every go back to the way it used to be.

Like, you know how when you’ve had something high quality, and you just can’t go back to the bargain brand again because you know what this product is supposed to be?

Well, Black Panther and Coco just introduced an entire generation of people (young and old alike) what positive representation is supposed to feel like.

People aren’t going to stand for “This character couldn’t be X because it’s a stereotype.”

People aren’t going to stand for “This character had a small role but it’s fine because X”

People ain’t gonna stand for “Finn can’t be written well because there’s no place for his story to go”

People aren’t going to stand for “Iron Fist couldn’t be Asian-American because it perpetuates a stereotype.

People aren’t going to stand for “We couldn’t find the right type of actor so we just went with a white person.”

People aren’t going to stand for “Let’s make the black woman a frog for the entire movie.”

People aren’t going to stand for “There weren’t any people of color in this era. It wouldn’t be historically accurate.”

People aren’t going to stand for “Well…it’s close enough, isn’t it? Why’re you complaining?”

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I just wanted to list a few resources for understanding the history of Black representation in Science Fiction and Fantasy film and comic books. I’ve only read a few of these though. The rest are on my TBR pile for the rest of the year.

Articles:

We’ll start with Samuel R. Delaney’s famous essay. I’ve been offering this essay to everyone on Tumblr as the answer to their questions on why we’ve been seeing so much blatant racism in fandom. It also answers the question on why people like the Sad Puppies exist.

—–Delany countered that the current Hugo debacle has nothing to do with science fiction at all. “It’s socio-economic,” he said. In 1967, as the only black writer among the Nebula nominees, he didn’t represent the same kind of threat. But Delany believes that, as women and people of color start to have “economic heft,” there is a fear that what is “normal” will cease to enjoy the same position of power. “There are a lot of black women writers, and some of them are gay, and they are writing about their own historical moment, and the result is that white male writers find themselves wondering if this is a reverse kind of racism. But when it gets to fifty per cent,” he said, then “we can talk about that.” It has nothing to do with science fiction, he reiterated. “It has to do with the rest of society where science fiction exists.”

On Racism in Criticism/Fandom

*This first title I couldn’t link to because the article is behind a paywall, but if you sign up for Medium.com you may be able to read it as part of your free preview. Yeah, there’s a class of White people (and yes, I mean White women too) who have collectively lost their everlovin’ minds about this movie, but not in any good way. Not only are there White dudes planning to sabotage the movie’s reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but also White gals writing concern trolling meta about Shuri being in an abusive relationship with her family, to produce tech for Wakanda.

*Sigh*

And the movie hasn’t even been released yet.

Now I would have been the first person to tell them their little plan was doomed to failure, and if they tried it they were gonna get their asses handed to them.These same people successfully pulled off this plan with the Ghostbusters remake (which people didn’t find out about until after the fact), but by the time Wonder Woman was released, everyone had learned a lesson from that, and it wasn’t successfully carried out. We will be getting a sequel to Wonder Woman, no matter how much they gnash their teeth.

Their plan failed, (will fail) here because first, they’re coming for Black people and we have a long history of disregarding anything White men say about the things we love, and second, they’re fucking with Disney, and Disney does not like people trying to fuck with their bottom line. This company has put a helluva lot of money into promoting this movie, and they’re not about to let a bunch of disgruntled, racist, fanboys mess their shit up.

So yeah, their Facebook page got pulled and even Rotten Tomatoes issued a response. What’s even sadder is that they tried to cover up their racism by claiming they were doing it on behalf of the DCEU.

*And this is why I’ve been advocating for more diverse reviewers, and giving the side eye to any negative reviews from White critics. I don’t know that I can trust them. There’s nothing wrong with a negative review of a movie with a Black cast, and if the reviewer was a person of color, I would give the review some consideration. Some movies aren’t for everyone, and this reviewer should have realized this. Its okay to not get everything in a movie, but this reviewer really needed to stay in his lane.

Black Panther: Can We Just Enjoy It?

—-The look on a young Black boy’s face when he sees a Black Panther toy commercial or a grown Black man’s face when he sees a Black Panther Lexus commercial is something special that shouldn’t be over-analyzed. There’s no think piece on capitalism that will change the fact that Black girls of all ages will see themselves in a spectrum of intelligent, strong, dark-skinned natural hair-wearing Black women in a major Hollywood blockbuster for the first time. African speculative fiction has finally reached mainstream culture, and it’s a great feeling.

Given that the blipsters who sport African dress very well could be Yoruba or Fulani, it’s not quite fair to accuse them of appropriating the fashions of such groups. African Americans, after all, have the dubious distinction of not knowing what their traditional dress is. For them, wearing African attire has always been more complicated than “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission,” as Susan Scafidi, author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, defines cultural appropriation.

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I stumbled across this website that rates movies according to diversity and inclusion. I’m not entirely sure I agree with some of the grades. I think this website is a lot stricter in its qualifications than I am, but I found it interesting:

https://www.mediaversityreviews.com/tv-reviews

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I laughed at this waaay harder than I should have. I’m still laughing at it!

vulcandroid

i will never be over the fact that during first contact a human offered their hand to a vulcan and the vulcan was just like “wow humans are fucking wild” and took it

“sir…these…these humans…they greet each other by…” *glances around before furtively whispering* “byclasping hands…”

*prolonged silence* “oh my…”

“sir…sir how will we make first contact with them? surely we…we cannot refuse this handclasping ritual, they will take it as an insult, but what vulcan would agree to such a distasteful and uncomfortable ritual??”

*several pensive moments later* “contact the vulcan high command and tell them to send us kuvak. i once saw that crazy son of a bitch arm wrestle a klingon, he’ll put his hands on anything”

Black Hogwarts

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Carrying the fandom load

It does get tiring at times staying conscious of bigoted tropes in fandom, deciding not to support racist art, wondering if a quote is appropriative of Jewish experiences, discarding a homophobic fanwork idea, and more.

So as a Fandom Old I can see why some fans long for the “good old days.” Back then anything went! Total creative freedom! We were wild and unfettered! None of these long-winded discussions, we just went and did it and did not give a single fuck!

Except freedom wasn’t for everyone, was it? You only had that total freedom if you were unaffected by fandom’s racism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, ableism, and a host of other bigotries that are a reflection of the world we live in.

Fandom was never the carefree, escapist enterprise some of us like to think it was. It’s just that minority fans were bearing the load of others’ freedom in silence. Too often, fans who were marginalized in real life could not escape to fandom because fandom would uncritically celebrate their oppression and trauma. And if they dared to speak about it they were bullied and shouted down into silence, into leaving.

I speak in the past tense but this is still ongoing, obviously. Fans of marginalized identities are a little more vocal now, but are facing a sustained and vicious backlash that accuses them of being “bullies” and starting “discourse” and “drama” and of “virtue signalling.”

It’s not about discourse or virtue, though. It’s about fans being told that they are not welcome unless they bite their tongues, grin, and go along with a thousand stings and slaps in the very spaces they go to have fun. It’s about fans having to watch characters who look like them be constantly erased and demonized. It’s about fans having to spend endless amounts of time and energy educating other fans about their oppression when all they’d like to do is unwind after a long day made longer by those very issues.

It’s not about virtue. It’s about people.

The thing is, fans who criticize minority fans and their allies for “discourse” aren’t angry about the fact that fandom puts these psychological burdens on minority fans. They’re mad about having to share a tiny little part of the burden minority fans, most visibly Black women, have been carrying for too long. In the minds of these “discourse”-critical fans the burden of considering the impact of fandom and fanworks is not theirs to bear. It is the lot of fans who are not them, “others,” to pay the cost for the majority’s creative freedom. The very suggestion that the load exists, and worse, that all of fandom should share in it so marginalized fans don’t carry it so disproportionately, is enough to make a lot of fans uncomfortable. I know, because I feel that discomfort at times, too.

The thing is, the load of thinking about marginalization in fandom spaces was always mine to bear. It’s every fan’s responsibility to be conscious of how they create and consume fanwork so that they don’t hurt other fans, so fandom can be inclusive and fun for everyone.

No, it’s not pleasant. It’s not fun to always watch yourself and second guess your choices, to fall short anyway and be called out and confront the fact that you have so many unconscious biases and have hurt others. I get it. I do. I want to think of myself as a good person. I don’t like admitting to wrongdoing. I hate challenging myself. I don’t want to think about this hard stuff. I just want to have fun!

But think about how much LESS fun it is when it’s your own humanity on the line. Many marginalized fans don’t have the luxury of just letting go and having fun, not when they always have to brace themselves for the next psychological assault.

These fans have been carrying this fandom burden and are punished for saying it’s too heavy. If you’re feeling a little less feather light in fannish activities than you used to, that’s a good sign! It means you’re starting to carry, in a very small measure, the fandom load of consciousness. It’s something you should be carrying as part of a community, and chances are it’s still not nearly as heavy a load as many marginalized fans are still made to bear.

A community joins together, watches out for its members, shares in the good and the bad. If some members are asked to bear the costs of others’ fun and either stay silent about it or leave, then the promise of community rings pretty hollow, doesn’t it? Sometimes discomfort is a good thing, and if my small discomfort means I am sharing in a tiny measure of my rightful load in fandom spaces, then it is a very good thing indeed.

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I’m not a huge advocate for violence, but some of the racist wankery that various fandoms get up to, just makes me want to give some people a very sharp pinch, with tweezers, Sometimes several. I mean seriously! I didn’t even know this was a thing. You have got waaay too much time on your hands, and a massive hate-boner, if you are cutting PoC out of their own photos, to prop up your non-canon, white male ship.

So I’m writing something about how characters and actors of color are literally cut out of images in order to center white characters/actors (usually for shipping purposes) and I’d like to be able to actually link to examples of instances where that’s happened.

I’ve got an image of John and Daisy where John has been replaced by Driver (courtesy of @xprincessrey ’s recent post in the fandom racism tag) and SEVERAL images where Iris West has been erased and replaced by Caitlin that I referenced in my presentation on the misogynoir directed towards her.

I need more examples though and I honestly don’t know how to find what I’m looking for. And… I’m really bad at finding images on the internet.

So if you have collected any receipts on this particular fandom phenomenon where fans cut out characters/actors of color from images in order to focus on a white character or ship, please let me know. I’ll link to your post on the subject if you’ve made one and give you credit for finding the images that I use if you want it.

I need examples of:

Anthony Mackie being cut out of press images for either Winter Soldier or Civil War

Scott/Tyler Posey being cut out of Teen Wolf press images or scenes in the show

Photo manips where Finn/John Boyega has been replaced by Kylo/Adam

Any other fandom that cut characters of color out in this way!

I’m writing a thing and I’m working on the header image already but I’d like more examples because man… People need to know that this is a thing that happens and pictures help drive the whole thing in.

(Also, unfortunately I have no idea how y’all can submit straight up images to me because I don’t use tumblr submit for several reasons, BUT you can always DM me images on twitter or use Tumblr IM if you don’t have links to images, but want to send them to me anyway.)

Here, they didn’t erase Martha Jones entirely, they made her a third wheel in a series the fandom felt Rose was rightfully entitled to. IMO this is as much of an in-your-face “fuck you” to Martha as pretending she didn’t exist.

Britchell. This is a more obscure ship, but it relentlessly erased, sidelined and minimized one of my favorite characters, Annie Sawyer of Being Human (UK) for being romantically involved with Mitchell, played by Aidan Turner, who also played Kili in The Hobbit. Britchell was a crossover between Mitchell and another character played by the actor who played Kili’s brother Fili in The Hobbit. Anyway. Britchell is the biggest ship in the Being Human fandom to this day.

In Shadowhunters Jalec and Clalec shippers always use Malec scenes for their manips in order to erase Magnus. Here’s an example of a Clalec manip (x). I stay away from their tags and blacklist Jalecs and Clalecs on sight, but pretty sure Google has plenty of more examples. Luke is constantly excluded from the group fanarts, fan videos, etc.

Also, Rickylers in TWD always try to erase Michonne from her own narrative.

This week, the new CW show Black Lightning will introduce another Black superhero — rather, Black superheroes — who will thankfully diversify the current ranks of primarily white TV and movie heroes, but it also raises the question: How will the show address its blackness?

With Black Lightning and Black Panther on the way, we’re finally seeing Black heroes represented on both the small screen and the big screen, and with the amount of publicity they deserve. But for Black people around America — and perhaps around the world — these heroes represent more than just the newest installment of a money-making machine built on franchises. These heroes bring familiar faces — faces that resemble their own — to a universe full of magic, superpowers, superhuman feats and abilities.

Blackness in the Media

But how, exactly, do these heroes represent “blackness”? And what, exactly, is “blackness”? This question is never asked of TV shows, movies, or books that feature white heroes. In writing programs or conferences, you’ll encounter panels and workshops in which people discuss how one may write characters of color with sensitivity. In other words, “How can I make it clear that this character is Black without being offensive?” But it’s more than just an issue of figuring out how to avoid your run-of-the-mill racist language. It’s determining if a character of color needs to be defined by their race.

Because whiteness is our country’s default racial lens, if race isn’t mentioned in a story’s narrative, most people will assume a character is white (take, for example, the “Black Hermione” internet debate). White characters are never characterized by their whiteness unless it serves the plot. So many times, however, Black characters or characters of color are defined by their race. “Black” isn’t a character type, nor is it a personality. And yet, because blackness falls so outside of the norm in common thought, it becomes the defining characteristic of a protagonist.

Yo! Black people! Listen up!

I already KNOW y’all gonna sneak food into Black Panther. How do I know? Cuz all my friends are. Cuz all my family will. Cuz I’M going to sneak food into Black Panther. I’m going to do that all five times that I see the movie. Cuz theater food is A: not good and B: too damn expensive.

That said, remember, some of us WORK in theaters. Which means that if we all leave our outside food trash in a theater, we’re going to see a lot of our family being fired. Yes, theater employees can get FIRED if they find our people snuck in food.

So first of all, don’t be obvious and don’t get caught. Second of all, DO NOT LEAVE YOUR TRASH IN THE THEATER!

This doesn’t mean “don’t just put your empty bag of hot fries under the seat” (though, don’t do that either, act like you have a Mama). This means, do not put your outside food trash in the theater trash receptical. The bosses WILL see that and the employees WILL suffer for it.

Come on y’all, let’s not risk Black people’s jobs while supporting this movie.

Also, just a reminder to not bootleg this movie, and square up with anyone that does.

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Black Panther Toy Ad

This is what’s so great about this ad, and about Black Panther in general. I love that they added a little Black girl to the ad, and let her play just like the boys. (Ftr, I have no objection the White boy in the ad, because Black Panther is for everyone to enjoy, and I sincerely hope everyone does. We like to be inclusive here at Chez Lkeke.)

Because characters of color have historically been relatively marginalized in movies, comics, and television, toys and commercials like this simply haven’t existed before which is a shame in and of itself but has deeper consequences. Oftentimes, the first step towards becoming a fan of something or part of a larger fandom is finding a character that you can relate to when you’re young and then seeing your relationship with them validated by the world around you.

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This post elaborates on larger piece I wrote, about how White writers tend to think of race, and how that plays out in alien invasion movies, which is something I briefly touched on in my Invasion of the Body Snatchers reviews. White people have a tendency to believe they lack pathology, but a closer look reveals that much of their thinking plays out in the pop culture created by White, straight, cis-gender, men.

WHITE FRAGILITY

by Robin DiAngelo

http://w-f.is/uai.html
Whites are taught to see their perspectives as objective and representative of reality15. The belief in objectivity, coupled with positioning white people as outside of culture (and thus the norm for humanity), allows whites to view themselves as universal humans who can represent all of human experience. This is evidenced through an unracialized identity or location, which functions as a kind of blindness; an inability to think about Whiteness as an identity or as a “state” of being that would or could have an impact on one’s life. In this position, Whiteness is not recognized or named by white people, and a universal reference point is assumed. White people are just people. Within this construction, whites can represent humanity, while people of color, who are never just people but always most particularly black people, Asian people, etc., can only represent their own racialized experiences16.

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The above post is also connected to the idea of “Cousin Culture” among PoC, and is related to an article written by Damon Young, for The Root, titled : Do White People Have Cousins?

What is cousin culture, you ask? It’s existing in a family where:

Cousins matter;

There’s no real distinction between first, second and third cousins; and

There are a few people who don’t share any blood with you but are your cousins, too, just because their asses are around all the time and you didn’t even know they weren’t technically related to you until you were, like, 25.

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This post was part of a long discussion about racism in Tolkien’s works, whether or not Tolkien himself was a racist, how did this racism play out in his writings, and can Tolkien’s influence be blamed for so much of the racism to be found in fantasy settings. The Hobbit was written in 1937, and since that time, there has been a metric fuckton of film and literature that was heavily influenced by Tolkien’s books. S

Tolkien may not have been an avowed racist, like H.P. Lovecraft, but like him he had a profound effect on fantasy literature, and he certainly had a blind-spot as regards race, as do most of the people writing in the fantasy genre, and their fans.

Please take the time to visit and follow: diversetolkien for more on this subject.

Hey guys my name is SomethingSomething MiddleInitial [Redacted] and today i’m gonna introduce you to the high fantasy world i’ve created! There’s lots of great diversity such as:
-White people that come in flavours of viking, merchant, and magical
-Tall elegant white people with pointy ears
-Short hardy white people with beards and axes

And don’t you worry: because i’m a coward i’ve also created a variety of non-human races that can be used as allegories for oppression without having to properly represent people of color in my work! You’re welcome!

In a morbid, kind of way it’s interesting to see how the internalized racism in Tolkien’s time that went unchecked due to the white society he was born in continues to go unchecked and internalized in the Tolkien fandom by white fans today.

The racist tropes that he wrote into his books are quite obviously those cultivated from his time, and because of the time they were written in it was a little more…understandable that readers then were unable to realize their problematic nature. But still in 2017 white fans are still oblivious (either by ignorance or on purpose) to the deeper racism in his works, and that’s kind of scary.

And a lot of it comes from the fact that the fandom is so “white” dominate, so racism is typically examined from a “white” perspective, where it is whitesplained (Ie: No black people in Middle Earth, which to be fair isn’t quite true).

White fans tend to see racism as “action” as in, you must be doing a racist thing for it to be considered racist, and if you’re not doing a racist thing then you aren’t racist, and fail to realize that in itself racism starts with a mindset rather than an action. So “subtle” hints of racism get ignored.

Instances of racism that would be recognizable by people of color are invisible to white fans only because they haven’t experienced it, and have already solidified a “white” view of racism.

That said, the fact that white fans are more willing to listen to other white fans about racism in Tolkien’s characters and fandoms then they are willing to listen to actual people of color is, I think, is another example of white washed racism in the Tolkien fandom.

Racism is valid when white people are talking about it, but annoying, discourse, or reaching when people of color are talking about it. Why is that so? When did we get to this point?

The fact that I’ve seen white fans talking about racism being more well received than me and other fans of color talking about racism is disturbing, especially for a fandom that’s supposed to be so liberal (but the majority of fans I’ve seen in Tolkien-Tumblr are all white women in their late 20s and above, and thus the award holders for white feminism. And they validate the 16 year old white girls who think a year on tumblr gives them a degree on social justice, so an unhealthy cycle is continued).

If you find yourself drooling over a white girl’s explanation of racism in Tolkien fandom but rolling your eyes when a fan of color talks about it, then you need to reevaluate your life. Because white girls only know surface racism, people of color live it.

And this goes back to my point of “white washed” racism, and even further to our non-liberal fandom. It’s almost disappointing to see that as a fandom, we haven’t really progressed past Tolkien’s traditional, imperialistic views as far as racism goes.

I think a lot of this has to do with white feminism. One of the reasons we consider ourselves a liberal fandom because we can talk about sexism. But that’s slave-time feminism if we’re suddenly unable to listen to fans of color do the same with racism.

And of course I’m not talking about all white people in the Tolkien fandom, but it’s not very many that are not like this.

When people are criticizing Lord of the Rings for not having POC in them, it’s more of a criticism on Jackson rather than Tolkien himself, considering Tolkien does have people of color in his works (and elves too).

But the weird part about this is “die hard “ Tolkien fans are the ones defending Jackson’s whitewashed version of the film, despite the fact that there are canonically poc in Tolkiens works.

So like, that’s how you spot racist fans I guess? They’re die hard until someone asks why poc–which are in canon–are erased from Jackson’s portrayal? Suddenly it’s all “well its based off of norse mythology” or some bs like that despite the fact that a) it’s based off of other cultures and b) canonically Tolkein has POC in it.

So you’re “die hard” for the story, but you conveniently forget that there’s poc in it? In fact you’re so adamant about being anti-poc in his works because you’re such good fans?

I mean do yall Tolkienites defending Jackson’s white washing on the basis of it being “european” forget that some of its based off of ancient egypt? But you’re still the ones losing your shit over black elves and people? And just poc in general? I don’t get it.

Like you’re die hard until it gets a little too colorful for you. Why are you like this?

Yeah, never let women off the hook for this shit. Or people who aren’t het, for that matter. Transformative fandom in general, AO3 in particular, is overwhelmingly made up of women, most of whom are white, and a good majority according to their polling do not identify as cishet. And it is a cesspool of white prioritization everywhere you look. Women did that all on their own with little to no male influence.

Anyway. They’re like that because they’re used to media centering on characters who look like them and they’ve been conditioned to believe that the whitewashing of history by.the film industry is accurate.

And really? Middle Earth, especially as portrayed by Jackson, has that “simpler times” brand of nostalgia for a time when white people didn’t have to worry about the rights of Black and brown people, it was out of sight, out of mind. Middle Earth being all white (except for otherized, threatening, rarely seen races) is part of the fantasy for a lot of people.

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Representation Matters

So I’ve been overwhelmed by the black panther comicon appearance and I’ve been dwelling on how revolutionary the black panther movie is going to be, what it’s going to mean to countless people when this movie comes out and how long we still have to go, So I decided to put this short photoset together to illustrate exactly how big of a deal it is and how it is bigger than one person.

it’s so bittersweet because when I was younger (especially growing up where I did, a black kid in Finland) I really wished I had more access to imagery and media that reflected who I was because it would have made my life radically different for the better and I wouldn’t be at 26 (STILL) doing damage control but on the flipside, I’m so in awe of all of the beautiful talent in 2016 that younger black kids are able to see and be inspired by.

I think I was like 4 years old when I conciously picked up race and color via watching Disney’s “Aladdin” and I noticed how Jafar, the evil royal guards etc the villains were more ethnic looking or a shade darker than the “good” characters.

it’s insidious because you’re seeing something but at age 4, you don’t have the comprehension skill or knowledge to break it down and see it for what it is (Colorism, Societal bias against black people which is rooted in centuries of white supremacist doctrine, society associates things that are dark/darker colors with evil, danger, ugliness, dirt etc) and reject it.

so you pick it up and see it on a surface level and you think to yourself “well darker must mean ugly, criminal and less human”…then what happens when you look at yourself in the mirror and find out that you are black?

and guess what? if a 4 year old black kid can pick that up and internalize that about him/her/themselves….then a white kid can sponge up the same language and imagery that dehumanizes black people too (subconciously/conciously)…what happens when when these people grow up? become teachers, doctors, law enforcement etc? what kind of impact is that going to have?

I’m going off on a tangent and that’s just one personal example but society does that on a global grand scale and it is largely unchecked.

but honestly though,look at the photoset and think about how many talented people out there that we love and respect….who would NOT have achieved the things they did if it wasn’t for another person before them inspiring them to reach their goals and acting as trail blazers when it seemed as though it was impossible….then think about the flipside and how many people, with all the potential in the world, never lived to become great because they were met with more images dehumanizing them than ones uplifting them…this is why the fight for HONEST representation is important and it continues.

…anyway, here are some pictures to make you smile, the next gen gives me hope

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Forthcoming Posts (Maybe?):

I’ve decided to wait for the DVD release of Blade Runner 2049 to do the second part of my review.

I’m going to wait for a couple more episodes before I review The X-Files, and 911. Black Lightning, Electric Dreams on Amazon, The Magicians, The Alienist, and something not really on showing up anyone’s radar, unless they have Starz, called Counterpart, which stars J.K Simmons..

A review of first half of season 8 of The Walking Dead.

The use/themes of fashion in movies and TV, the best TV/Movie costumes, and a post on “Movies I loved but y’all hated”.

I hope to get a lot of these done, along with posts about the importance of the movie Bebe’s Kids, The Thing vs. The Thing, Hannibal the series: Season Three, and more Star Trek Discovery.

I’ve found it’s more helpful for me to watch a batch of episodes of a show, and then review it, rather than trying to catch individual episodes. It’s probably best not to pay too close attention to my promises, anyway though. I’ve often found my ambitions to be greater than my time.

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Here’s a collection of some of the better themed movie essays from the last few weeks:

The Last Jedi

The Last jedi was a very polarizing film, apparently. It’s one of those films that seem to have no middle ground. Either you hate it for ruining your childhood, or you love it because it was some fun and unpredictable filmmaking. On the other hand there’s some really wrong character shit going on in this movie, that is completely at odds with what happened in the last one. And then there’s the emphasis on Space Fuckbwoy, Kylo Ren. That was just deeply, deeply 🙄 Meh!

Despite all of the above, I actually enjoyed the movie, though. I went into it expecting a lot of action, some laughs, and a little bit of depth, and that’s mostly what I got. There were definitely parts I didn’t care for (I thought the Rey and Kylo scenes were cringeworthy, and the movie could have used more Rose, Finn and Poe, acting like normal people, the way they did in the first movie,) but overall, the movie was watchable, with lots of action, some moments of pathos, and bravery, and just plain awesomeness, and many people seem to really love it. I’m giving those people the side eye, just a tiny bit 😳but they love it, so okay. I think it measures up to the first trilogy pretty well, (but with better acting from Mark Hamill, who I loved.

Media and Race

*A post about how White those Hallmark Xmas movies are. There are a handful of movies with African-Americans in them, that are about Xmas, but this post questions why Hallmark movies are so alike, as to be interchangeable.

*Whenever possible, I like to read reviews by PoC, especially when the movies they’re reviewing have prominent people of color in the casts. I intend to do this for Black Panther, just as I did for Luke Cage, and Beyonce’s Lemonade, not because White people don’t have anything to say, but because reviews by White critics will be easily accessible, and I want to signal boost the opinions of the people these movies are about.

The latest Star Wars movie features three MoC, and finally, a WoC , and I want to hear what those critics have to say about them. Coco is a Spanish language cartoon centered in Mexican culture and I want to hear what actual Latinx critics have to say about the movie.

Media and Gender

Star Trek Discovery successfully tackled the subject of male rape and trauma, in its first season, while Brooklyn 99 tackled the subject of bi-sexuality, when one of its most prominent characters, Rosa Diaz, came out, paralleling the decision of the real life actress.

Readings From Brotha Wolf

Brotha Wolf has been covering the issues of media depiction of Black Americans for several years now. It’s always been my belief that the news media always has been directly complicit in the racist beliefs of White people. It disseminates sterotypes and reinforces prejudices, which is why PoC fight so hard to say that Representation Matters, Black Lives Matter, and yes, Pop Culture Matters.

When we argue that fandom is racist, lacks empathy for Black characters, and that White fandom has no other template from which to imagine fictional narratives of Black people, this is what we’re talking about. When White people insist we don’t belong in fantasy settings, historical settings, or even futuristic settings, our depictions in the news media as present day criminals is behind some of those beliefs.

In praise of the many depictions of Black women in the media:

Race & Media

“Somebody, anybody, sing a black girl’s song. Bring her out to know herself to know you.”

From Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf.

You know what’s made me happy lately? It’s all the differing depictions of Black womanhood that’s been in the media lately. From upcoming shows and movies, to programs that have already currently awaiting a new season (or have sadly been cancelled, like Still Star Crossed).

Allow me to explain.

I saw Thor Ragnarok with my sister. Now, I’m not really a Thor fan, but I was beyond hyped to see this movie simply for Tessa Thompson. I wouldn’t call myself a Trekkie by any means (I do love Star Trek DS9 though) but I love Michael Burnham in Discovery (and I love the fact that this show focuses on a Black woman who has a background in the sciences). I love Misty Knight in Luke Cage. My sister and I watched the first episode of Issa Rae’s Insecure recently, and I marveled at the writing and the characters of Issa and Molly. I’m beyond hyped for the Nakia, Shuri, Okoye, Queen Ramonda and the rest of the Dora Milaje in Black Panther. I can’t wait to see Thunder and Lightning in the new Black Lightning TV series, and Iris West in the upcoming Flash movie (honestly Kiersey Clemons should never have been cut from the Justice League movie, but that’s a rant for another time.)

It’s great to see little black boys dressed up as Falcon, Black Panther, Luke Cage, etc, but it’s just as important, if not more so, to see little Black girls dressed like Valkyrie, dressed like Shuri, dressed like Storm or Vixen. I hope that Michael Burnham as just as much impact on Black girls and Black women as Benjamin Sisko had on me.

I love that media, lately, has taken to singing “Black girls’ songs” because black women have always been the backbone of the Black community. And I hope it can continue because Black women/girls deserve all the positive representation in the world.

Black girls (just like Black boys) are seeing that there isn’t one way to be a black person. That black womanhood is made up of differing ideas, politics, feelings and emotions, and each one of them is valid.

That’s an important thing for our community, and I’m glad its being spotlighted. I’m glad we have directors like Ava Duvernay who chose to have Meg Murray be a Black girl. I’m glad we have movies like 2014′s Annie with Quevenzhane Wallis who showed that Black girlhood is something that’s just as innocent and hopeful as anything else. I’m glad we have The Wiz Live with Shanice Williams, Queen Latifah, Amber Riley, Mary J Blige, and Uzo Aduba to show off the multiplicity and magic (yes, actual fucking magic) of Black women. I’m glad we have Laverne Cox, because her mere presence on screen is a validation for Black Trans Women who rarely see themselves in a positive light. I’m glad we have Riri Williams and her presence in the Iron Man narrative, just like I’m glad for the wild success of Hidden Figures, and I’m super excited for Taraji P Henson’s Proud Mary.

I’m here for any kind of representation for Black women because it’s needed now more than ever.

“There is racism in the writing of thousands of words’ worth of dissertation exploring the possibilities of Kylo Ren’s character based on the qualities and story arc that Finn has already shown and whose own plotline is canonically more feasible to what you lot claim as a powerful connection with Rey than the character who is the villain and has done nothing positive for/towards Rey. You lot have blatantly erased Finn’s characterization and actions. This is not isolated in that article. It’s a sentiment repeated continually by shippers that somehow pop-up in the FinnRey, Finn, and other tags. […] You lot are so concerned that you’re being accused of racism and instead of investigating yourselves of the inherent prejudices you might have, you decide to separate yourself from “the rest” which does nothing to quell the problem. Saying that majority of you are not racist does not magically negate r*ylo shippers from baring real-life prejudices that bleed into the consumption and interpretation of fiction. Your intent, no matter how positive you think it is, does not negate the impact of your and your lot’s actions, words, and works, that reek of internalized racism.” –@fakestarwarsfan

Black people’s contributions have pretty much been erased from all vectors of American history, and that includes most musical genres like Country, Rock, and even Punk.

Goth So White? | Black representation in the Post-Punk scene

One would be gravely mistaken to think that there is no black representation in the fundamental part of Punk’s history. To illustrate this fact, all one need do is take a look at photographer Michael Putland’s 1980 portrait ‘Ladies Tea Party’ that features Pauline Black, and Poly Styrene, along with Debbie Harry, Viv Albertine, and Siouxsie Sioux, and Chrissie Hynde.

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The Sugarcoated Language Of White Fragility

The language we use to talk about racism is obviously distorted, a big clue that something is being hidden. It’s pretty easy to pinpoint the source: most White people can’t handle talking about racism. We flail. We don’t understand the subject, we get really uncomfortable, and we either clam up because we don’t want to say the wrong thing, or we bust out the whitesplaining (FYI, this is a best-case scenario. It can be much worse).

To mitigate our shortcomings, we surround ourselves with comforting words. Words that feel neutral. Words that don’t point fingers (at us). Words that center Whiteness, while erasing the harshness of discrimination and segregation. We reject words that we feel are too direct, that might reveal complicity on our part.

Let’s be clear that these linguistic gymnastics are only fooling White people. People of color have been aware that corporate pushes for “diversity” are often flimsy CYA efforts to mask sustained homogeneity, and “inclusion” is often code for tokenism. Scholars of color have been writing about the nuances of privilege and oppression for a long, longtimewhile watching White people invent different ways to either wriggle out of, dominate, or shut down the conversation. These same scholars have also been watching White writers and educators whisper the same exact thing they’ve been shouting, and magically draw a crowd.

….

Terms like “inclusion” and “white privilege” are designed to sneak past the racial stress triggers of White Fragility. They center Whiteness in a way that makes White people comfortable, while deflecting from the stressful realities of the racist harm that Whiteness causes. Imagine how many racial stress trigger alarm bells would go off if we were using words like “discrimination awareness” and “white undeserved advantages” instead.

It has bothered me for years that linguistically, white supremacysounds kind of great. Almost holy. It would sound more appropriately scary if it were called something actively negative, like “White domination” or “White oppressorship.” Once again, imagine the White stress level skyrocketing.

Some disambiguation is necessary with this term. “White supremacy” is a system that prioritizes whiteness regardless of the presence or absence of racial hatred, but a “white supremacist” is a person who embraces overt racial hatred. It’s like a spectrum. By default, all White people are on the spectrum of complicity in upholding a system of White supremacy, but we only give the negative label of “White supremacists” to the really hateful people at the far end. This allows the rest of us to say “we’re not them.”

The white male style of debate is to antagonize you until you snap. Then they win by default, because they make up their own rules in which being upset automatically invalidates your argument. The key is also to argue about things that they have no stake and experience in, so they dont snap first. Of course in the event that they do snap first, its of course passion, not anger…

White people are like little kids who make up new rules and obnoxious powers to keep themselves from losing….

At the end of it all, they are happy that you are so civil and can debate things rationally and clearly without getting upset. Everyone shakes hands and thanks everyone for being able to discuss “conflicting” viewpoints. Because after all everyone needs to hear the opposing side to truly be sophisticated. Even if you’ve heard that side all your life and it completely devalues you as a human being.

What i hear is that the mark of civilization to white people is being dehumanized and taking it like a champ.

They also have little to no concept of power dynamics in these ‘sophisticated” discussions.

Evil_Tessmacher

This is a particularly aggressive form of Sealioning.

Sealioning is the name given to a specific, pervasive form of aggressive and willfully intentional cluelessness, that masquerades as a sincere desire to understand.

A Sealion is someone who, when confronted with a fact that they don’t care to acknowledge, say, the persistence of systemic racism in America, will ask endlessly for “proof” and insist that it is the other person’s job to stop everything they are doing and address the issue to their satisfaction.

The purpose of Sealioning is never to actually learn or become more informed. The purpose is to interrogate. Much like actual interrogators, Sealions bombard their target with question after question, digging and digging until the target either says something stupid or is so pissed off that they react in the extreme. The other major reason why people hate Sealioning is because responding to it is a complete waste of time.

It’s an insidious trap. Responding to questions asked reasonably is, of course, a natural thing for people to do. I like to do it myself; educating others is generally pretty entertaining, especially if they are receptive to learning. Dismissing those questions can appear condescending or rude, especially if you actually are condescending or rude.

Of course, these questions are not asked because the person asking them genuinely wants to know the answer. If they did, they would do their own digging based on your statements, and only ask for obscure or difficult-to-discover information. This is the “debate principle”. It is best explained thusly: When you go to a debate, you educate yourself on the topics at hand, and only request evidence when a claim is either quite outlandish or unflinchingly obscure.

No, these questions are asked to make a responder waste their time. It works, too; I’ve responded to Sealions before, answering all their questions and claims for evidence, only to be greeted by even more willful ignorance. It’s a way to force people into responding to questions phrased neutrally but asked in bad faith.

The name “Sealioning” comes from a most splendid webcomic, “Wondermark”, by David Malki.

Sealions are just “asking nicely” but they are asking questions that have been asked and answered fully many times, and are unwilling to so much as open a new tab to look up the answer, nor will they recognize the validity of your sources, your experience or expertise no matter what you do. It is impossible to satisfy a Sealion.

Make no mistake.

Sealioning is a specific form of harassment. You may not explain their inquiry has already been address. You may not cite a source. You may not refer to a previous answer. You definitely may not ever point them to a link. You must spend all your time and energy responding as much as you can to every little details of every innocent, polite little question they ask. Sealioning isn’t a sincere attempt at anything. It’s a calculated technique to grind an opponent down.

Not only is this a thing, it’s actually something various hard right groups are teaching their members to do. It’s essentially just never backing down no matter what, never admitting someone else is correct, and always try to force the argument onto the path you want to go down. So I’ve found the best way to combat it is:

A) Call them out on their inability to admit they were wrong. This sounds pretty simple, but it’s very easy to get dragged into whatever they say next instead of just pointing out that you’ve proven their first point is bullshit yet they’re still yakking on.

B) They try to box you into a corner? Box them back. If they won’t accept a link, laugh at them for failing to understand it/read it. Call them out for trying to veer the conversation in another direction without yielding the point. Specifically state that you see their cheap tactics and find them weak and a sign of a poor debater.

C) Never let them move onto the next question. Demand they answer yours instead. Why should they get to set the terms of the debate? Why is it always them who deserves explanations?

D) Suggest that they’re arguing in bad faith. That they don’t really want an answer. And if they say no way? Then point out that someone arguing in good faith would do all the things they refuse to. They’d read links and evidence. They’d agree on at least *something*. And failing that, they’d walk away. Good faith arguers will reach a certain point and then just say agree to disagree. But these guys? Won’t. They will not leave it alone no matter what. That’s the hallmark of a sealion trained to demoralise us.

And when they indirectly admit that, you call them out on it.

Then you don’t leave it alone. Hound that fucking sealion until he honks for mercy.

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here is why this is NOT true. white people are MARRIED to the racial construct that is “whiteness.” not flirting, not dating, not texting, not sexting, not engaged to.. married. long term. and as such they make decision in favor of their race out of motivation to see their race succeed.

they’ve built an entire country on the premise of giving white people a leg up on everyone even if it meant the use of brutal force in additional to lies, half truths and etc. this is the very basis of whiteness upon which white people of built their idea of self.

you CAN NOT be pro-black without being anti-white because pro-blackness calls for the destruction of white supremacy and white privilege which undergirds whiteness and white identity.

it’s like stokely carmichael said “for racism to die, a totally different america must be born. this is what the white society does not wish to face; this is why that society prefers to talk about integration. but integration speaks not at all to the problem of poverty, only to the problem of blackness. integration today means the man who ‘makes it,’ leaving his black brothers behind in the ghetto as fast as his new sports car will take him. it has no relevance to the harlem wino or to the cotton-picker making three dollars a day…. integration, moreover, speaks to the problem of blackness in a despicable way. as a goal, it has been based on complete acceptance of the fact that in order to have a decent house or education, blacks must move into a white neighborhood or send their children to a white school. this reinforces, among both black and white, the idea that ‘white’ is automatically better and ‘black’ is by definition inferior.”

there’s a reason why whenever black people talk about racism, white supremacy, white privilege, white ignorance, white inaction and etc, white people overall lose their shit. the reason is because white people have built their entire sense of self on whiteness which is built on lies and oppression. to be pro-black is to be anti-white. as long as white people define themselves in any way shape or form with whiteness as a social construct, pro-blackness will ALWAYS be ANTI-WHITE. always.

and bullshit like this just makes wonder why? is still about being in white people’s good graces? why? after EVERYTHING white people have done and continue to do to black people, why the flying fuck do you care of your pro-blackness is anti-white? this is some fuckery to still care what your slavemaster still thinks about you and your movement to gain your freedom. reminds me again of what stokely carmichael said “black power can be clearly defined for those who do not attach the fears of white america to their questions about it.“

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Sexism & Media

So whenever i would watch movies and see The Badass Female Character fighting in various ways, something about it always bugged me. I just assumed it was internalized misogyny that made me dislike characters like black widow and Tauriel and tried to make myself like them.

Then I was rewatching Mad Max Fury Road the other day and I noticed that nothing bothered me about watching Furiosa fight and I realized the problem wasn’t watching women fight in movies that got on my nerves.

Watching the stereotypical Badass Female Character she always has these effortless moves and a cocky, sexy smirk on her face as everything is easy. Watching Furiosa, she grunted and bared her teeth. Her fighting was hard and it took effort and it hurt like fighting is supposed to. For once her fighting style wasn’t supposed to seduce the audience it was to be effective.

I wasn’t disliking these characters because they were women I was disliking that their fighting was meant to remind me they were women. High heels and shapely outfits and not showing effort or discomfort because it’s more attractive to effortlessly lift a long leather clad leg over your head rather than rugby tackle someone.

It’s the same with the Wonder Woman movie too. Fighting is hard and it takes effort, blocking bombs and bullets with a shield makes her grimace and bare her teeth with the effort it takes. She’s not flip kicking bombs she’s yelling and straining, not because she’s weak or bad at fighting but because that’s what it would be like.

I really hope we’re moving into an era of women having fighting styles designed for realism and not how hot it looks for the men in the audience.

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Anonymous asked:

Don’t you think it’s messed up that we’re allowed to have long and lengthy discussions about tolkien and sexism and go into depth about how sexist he was. But the same people (mostly white girls/women) willing to discuss his sexism are the ones who ignore and deny his racism even when it’s as clear as day, or even make excuses as to why a certain thing trope or character isn’t racist.

(white feminist does not mean feminist who are white/European descent, it means feminist that don’t include intersectionality in their feminism, and often protrude racism in their feminism. Their feminism is for the privileged)

It’s because the Tolkien fandom has a white feminist problem, just like most fantasy fandoms have white feminist problems. Criticizing white female characters for valid reasons (in my case, racism) is automatically assumed as sexism.

They cling onto problematic white women as a source of empowerment, so when we as poc try to criticize these white women for doing racist things, we’re sexist because we dare suggest that their white icons are less than perfect, and are capable of racism.

We imply that their empowerment is racism, which it usually is. White feminist don’t like that, because they are now partly guilty of the racism in which their faves embody, only because they see their faves racist form of empowerment as empowering.

At this point, acknowledging that your fave is racist and moving on is the only thing you have to do to save yourself from being racist, which normal people do.

White feminist on the other hand vehemently defend and deny racism even when it’s slapping them in the face. It boils down to internalized racism, to the inability to see racism. And naturally people get defensive when you tell them they may be doing something racist.

They pretend that white women can’t be racist because they’re women, and sexism supposedly exempts them from racism. White feminist don’t like the idea that white women have privilege over certain groups of men (all non-white men), they’re busy playing victima at the cost of undermining racism.

White feminist are the poisons of fandoms, make it a toxic place for discussions of racism, and just an ostracizing place for people of color due to the fact they uphold racist white women as the epitome of female empowerment.

They don’t mind calling out white men who’re racist, but when it’s white women, we’ve crossed the line.

White feminism is part of the reason I made this blog tbh.

fuckyourfeelingsdarling

Thats like me calling ‘black feminists’ are the poison of feminist, there isnt a problem with names for things like this, but do i call a black feminist thats like that a ‘white feminist’ too?

It’s a racist name, prehaps you mean it in a different way, like ‘white’ in ‘white knights’, but we all know they call it ‘white feminists’ referring to their white skin color

I said: “white feminist does not mean feminist who are white/European descent, it means feminist that don’t include intersectionality in their feminism, and often protrude racism in their feminism. Their feminism is for the privileged.”

Writer’s Resources & Encouragement

I am a white author, and along with many other white authors I know, I worry about stereotyping characters or talking about a subject I don’t feel I have the right to. First off, we all need to get over the fear of misrepresentation or stereotyping and focus on doing our research. Obviously, every writer does not know the experience of EVERY race, culture, or sexuality, etc. However, as writers of any color, we are still capable of sharing these experiences through characters that might not be exactly like us. We shouldn’t exclude characters just because we don’t fully understand. We should do our job and learn more about them, so that these characters can have greater representation in fiction.

We all go through very similar experiences as human beings and we all have fears, hopes, dreams, and goals in some way or another. Acting like we can’t grasp a human experience because we’re not the same skin color is ridiculous. Sure, there are aspects of life that we only experience as a reflection of our skin color and our lives can be drastically different, but as writers we get into the heads of ALL different people. We spend time researching. We spend time trying to understand. Our curiosity and creativity IS what makes us writers. So, don’t be afraid to include characters that aren’t exactly like you because YOU DO IT ALL THE TIME AND YOU DON’T EVEN REALIZE IT.

Being afraid of “getting it wrong” might be a general fear, but you can’t let that stop you. If anything it should force you to do as much research as possible in order to get it right. It’s very hard to write a character wrong unless you are disrespectful of their experience, you don’t care, or you don’t take the time to understand something. And writing characters of color or characters that don’t share your background doesn’t mean knowing everything about their history since the dawn of time because you’re still writing within the context of your story. You need to make them real and you need to develop them, just like any other character.

There are so many opportunities to move beyond your “standard main character” and start writing more underrepresented characters. It’s a shame that this is something we have to discuss all the time, but as writers, we can break the cycle.

-Kris Noel

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This is just a general guideline for how NOT to write stereotypical Black characters. I should note that sometimes, depending on what you’re writing, a stereotype may be unavoidable, but sometimes that can be mitigated by giving the character a great deal of complexity and depth, if it’s a primary character. Best not try this with secondary or side characters. At any rate you should probably get what’s known as sensitivity readers, people from the racial backgrounds in question, who can point out if you’re being offensive.

I need to point out that you need to do your research on racial stereotypes. If you don’t know what they are, then you don’t to avoid using them, and considering yourself not racist isn’t enough. We all receive subtle racial messaging we are unaware of, on the daily.

Oh, and AAVE means African American Vernacular English (Slang). Just have them speak standard English because, unless you’re in the culture (or grew up speaking it), you’re definitely going to get the use of the words wrong. What’s interesting is that those of us who speak AAVE can always spot a fake, and can even tell what generation and/or geography a person is from, based on what AAVE they’re using. It’s just like any other language you don’t know. If you don’t know it, don’t try it.

Be extremely careful about insinuating that one or more of a Black character’s physical features are dirty, unclean, or ugly.

Feel free to add more.

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As I said, if you want to avoid racism in your work, its not enough to just think of yourself as colorblind. The problem with being colorblind is you don’t see the stereotypes you’re engaging in either. You have to actively think about the use and placement of race within the narrative.

Its great that people are asking, “how can we write fantasy worlds without racism?” Escapism in fantasy is almost impossible for marginalized people, because we’re usually the only ones who have to accept the same bigotries in-text as we do in real life, because its tied to someone’s “escapism”. For them, we either have a lower place in society that they can openly exploit, or we shouldn’t exist at all. We need to deal with abuse in order for them to accept that fantasy world as a viable setting. But I have an issue with just leaving it at “lets keep racist text out of the stories”.

See, the problem with making worlds where there is no racism is that so many people haven’t quite figured out how to do that right. Its like they take this idea of “colorblind racism’ here no one sees skin color, hence its just “coincidence” that all the black people are subservient, or that all the Asian women are submissive and tiny.

Some examples (using my context as a mixed black person who identifies as black in most settings):

They’ll make a world where no one ever utters a single racial slur but still will use the same anti-blackness we see in real life (i.e. whenever they make us mammies or sacrificial lambs, using terms like “dirty” or “demonic” to describe our appearance a la Lord of the Rings, etc.)

Or they’ll make sure that no one ever says “people color should be slaves” but lo and behold, that’s pretty much all you see. (Like in Exodus, or the earlier seasons of Game of Thrones). And we’re the only ones who HAVE to take THAT subservient role or else we’re “ruining the accuracy”. And when you call it out they say, “well that what you all were” but they won’t get why that’s just as bad as if they’d just admitted, “Hey, this is pretty racist” from the start.

Or (taking from what I said up there) they’ll make people who look black, and are from a culture obviously based on black people, but still claim they aren’t black, because they would rather divorce blackness from their world, instead of admitting we can be complex characters who can carry complex stories (because they still haven’t unpacked their own problematic ideas about black people)

Or worse still, they’ll make an entire world based off of a culture belonging to a group of people who they won’t even include. I.e. the whole issue with Firefly and Serenity, and again Exodus.

Or we’ll be turned into white people with special powers or pointy ears. Racism becomes, “hey this girl has red hair instead of blond hair lets exclude her”. Meanwhile since there’s “no real racism” they claim there’s no need for “real” people of color (i.e. the problem with Dragon Age).

Or they’ll do some “colorblind” setting where everyone is mixed, but well all be reminded that only Aryan features are seen as “rare” and “special” an they’ll treat the rest of our features (i.e. brown skin, ark eyes, dark hair, etc. ) as “meh”.

Your worlds aren’t “racism free” just because make sure no one says the n-word.

Unless you really make an effort to think critically about these things (which includes trying to avoid: dehumanizing marginalized people, failing to include them as a part of the storyline unless the story “calls for it”, reducing them down to “inspiration porn” or metaphors, making them interchangeable, using fictional creatures in order to representation them, while making all humans white by default, etc.) then you run the risk of just being all talk.

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Here’s another reason to actively think about the subject of race when writing (or even not writing) your work. Just because the world you’re writing about is colorblind, does not mean that you, or your readers, are. You and your audience exist in a universe where race is a factor, and you will bring that into your work, no matter how well-intentioned you believe yourself to be.

If you do not mention your characters being specifically non-white? Your white readers will view them ALL as canonically white.

It is our responsibility to make it very, very clear that our characters are POC.

Just look at the horrifically racist Hermione debacle. She is canonically described as having big hair and dark skin. And yet, the white supremacists in the fandom are ripping apart any person who canons her as black. Despite the fact that a Black Hermione makes her being called slurs, and her commitment to SPEW SO much more significant and powerful.

We NEED to specifically and explicitly state that our characters are not white. We also need to make one million times sure (I’m talking aggressive paid and volunteer editing from any marginalized group you don’t belong to) that we are not enforcing racist stereotypes or damaging marginalized people.

Even if you’re writing a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel where humanity doesn’t care about race anymore (yikes), you need to think long and hard about why the “skin colour doesn’t matter” villain who betrays them all just happens to be Black.

Fanfiction

Here are one person’s thoughts on the nature, purpose, and importance of fanfiction. I have observed that any popular media that appeals to, or is created by women, is often denigrated by men, and fanfiction, since it’s primarily created and consumed by women, is not exempt from this. Its part of the general attitude of degrading anything that women do (cooking), or create (fanfiction), or consume (romance novels), in an attempt to elevate the work of male creators and consumers.

I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn.

Most of the history of Western literature (and probably much of non-Western literature, but I can’t speak to that) is adapted or appropriated from something else. Homer wrote historyfic and Virgil wrote Homerfic and Dante wrote Virgilfic (where he makes himself a character and writes himself hanging out with Homer and Virgil and they’re like “OMG Dante you’re so cool.“ He was the original Gary Stu). Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic. In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck. Shakespeare doesn’t have a single original plot–although much of it would be more rightly termed RPF–and then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic. Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didn’t like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school. And Spenser! Don’t even get me started on Spenser.

Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion. Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome. (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.) People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude I’ve never heard of? There’s a new Sir Gawain story out, man! (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.)

I also find fanfic fascinating because it takes all the barriers that keep people from professional authorship–barriers that have weakened over the centuries but are nevertheless still very real–and blows right past them. Producing literature, much less circulating it, was something that was well nigh impossible for the vast majority of people for most of human history. First you had to live in a culture where people thought it was acceptable for you to even want to be literate in the first place. And then you had to find someone who could teach you how to read and write (the two didn’t necessarily go together). And you needed sufficient leisure time to learn. And be able to afford books, or at least be friends with someone rich enough to own books who would lend them to you. Good writers are usually well-read and professional writing is a full-time job, so you needed a lot of books, and a lot of leisure time both for reading and writing. And then you had to be in a high enough social position that someone would take you seriously and want to read your work–to have access to circulation/publication in addition to education and leisure time. A very tiny percentage of the population fit those parameters (in England, which is the only place I can speak of with some authority, that meant from 500-1000 A.D.: monks; 1000-1500: aristocratic men and the very occasional aristocratic woman; 1500-1800: aristocratic men, some middle-class men, a few aristocratic women; 1800-on, some middle-class women as well).

What’s amazing is how many people who didn’t fit those parameters kept writing in spite of the constant message they got from society that no one cared about what they had to say, writing letters and diaries and stories and poems that often weren’t discovered until hundreds of years later. Humans have an urge to express themselves, to tell stories, and fanfic lets them. If you’ve got access to a computer and an hour or two to while away of an evening, you can create something that people will see and respond to instantly, with a built-in community of people who care about what you have to say.

I do write the occasional fic; I wish I had the time and mental energy to write more. I’ll admit I don’t read a lot of fic these days because most of it is not–and I know how snobbish this sounds–particularly well-written. That doesn’t mean it’s “not good”–there are a lot of reasons people read fic and not all of them have to do with wanting to read finely crafted prose. That’s why fic is awesome–it creates a place for all kinds of storytelling. But for me personally, now that my job entails reading about 1500 pages of undergraduate writing per year, when I have time to read for enjoyment I want it to be by someone who really knows what they’re doing. There’s tons of high-quality fic, of course, but I no longer have the time and patience to go searching for it that I had ten years ago.

But whether I’m reading it or not, I love that fanfiction exists. Because without people doing what fanfiction writers do, literature wouldn’t exist. (And then I’d be out of a job and, frankly, I don’t know how to do anything else.)

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Writing with Color on Tumblr is a great resource for writing characters of other races, ethnicities, and cultures. if you have any questions about how to write a certain character they have the advice for it. They can also provide resources for sensitivity readers, and volunteer editors, of your work.

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Here are some posts and articles about film and tlevision that I couldn’t fit into the last post. These are just things I found interesting in my internet travels, some old, some new:

On Television

Samurai Jack has long been one of my all-time favorite cartoons. First, its simply a gorgeous looking cartoon, and and much deeper, philosophically, than it ever needed to be to entertain teenagers. This article is almost like an ode to the series:

A lone samurai clad in white stares up in horrified awe at a gargantuan future city, constructed with neon bright colors, clashing machinery, and aliens speaking in a tongue foreign to his ear. This samurai travels through lands of the mythic and mundane, the natural and the supernatural. Here he is again, alone, in a dense forest. The only sounds are chirping crickets and the fire that crackles before him — until a vision of his long-deceased father rips through the tranquility, admonishing him for his failure. These moments aren’t from a prestige TV series with A-list talent or a long-lost Akira Kurosawa film. They’re from Samurai Jack, the animated series created by Genndy Tartakovsky that premiered in 2001, ran for four seasons, and was revived for a fifth and final season that ended this past weekend.

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Note: This is a 13 page paper studying Whiteness in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The Caucasian Persuasion of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Ewan Kirkland

This paper explores Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a particularly white
text. By this I mean, the series is both populated by archetypal white characters, and informed by various structures, tropes and perspectives Dyer identifies as characterising
whiteness.

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There are simply not enough WoC in genre fiction, certainly not as primary characters. Shows like Superstition, The Walking Dead, Z Nation, and Daniel Jose Older’s Shadowshaper Series, make a specia leffort to be diverse, but we need more, and better depictions of fantastical WoC on screen, and in genre literature. We need more Black female witches, vampires and werewolves, and stories that are not alwyas about us dealing with the modern world in the same old way. (We need WoC power fantasies, too.)

Laveau encapsulates better than any other historical figure the narrow position black witches hold in the public imagination. (It’s important to note that, to examine this trend, I am using “witches” as a catch-all term for these characters, including rootworkers and voodoo priestesses.) While their practices — whether Haitian voodou or rootwork — are appropriated to add a flash of exoticism, they often remain thinly drawn figures, pushed to the margins of their respective stories. They are used to incite fear or curiosity in the white imagination, which remains deeply suspicious of black ancestral practices that don’t allow for easy translation. In pop culture, the historical underpinnings of these practices — which were brought to America by slaves trying to fiercely hold onto their own belief systems, even as colonialism tried to beat it out of them — are traded for a simpler, highly exoticized portrayal.

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I’m always up for some Iron Fist bashing. Not exactly because I hate him (although I certianly hate that show) but more because I think I’m really mad about what we culd have had, had we listened to Asian-Americans, and simply cast Lewis Tan, for example.

It’s hard to not imagine what could have been. For years, Asian-Americans had hoped that Marvel would cast an Asian-American actor as the lead of its Netflix series Iron Fist, only for the role to go to Game of Thrones alum Finn Jones. The decision wasn’t exactly surprising — after all, the character Danny Rand is white in the original comics — but a casting reversal would have turned a stereotypical narrative into a fresh story about an Asian-American reclaiming his roots. Now, we know that Marvel had seriously considered the possibility: Actor Lewis Tan was on hold for Danny Rand before he was offered the role of the one-off villain Zhou Cheng, who appears in episode eight of Iron Fist.

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Ben Wasserman clarifies exactly why Iron Fist failed as a series.

And finally, this brings us to IRON FIST, Marvel Studio’s first true narrative flop. Even with all the problems regarding the series’ dialogue, editing and stunt choreography, I believe these problems could have been lessened to an extent had the story been worth caring about. Yet throughout his narrative, Danny Rand is presented as an entitled child whose actions never fit his status, constantly failing to prove his fighting abilities during numerous action sequences while simultaneously being praised as K’un Lun’s greatest fighter by one too many characters. Granted, one could equate this factor to poor choreography, but considering the praise given to DAREDEVIL’s hallway fight, there really is no excuse for sloppiness in a show centered on mystical kung-fu. And yet, underneath this convoluted mess of a narrative lies a theme that could very well have tied in with the other DEFENDERS shows: the rejection of one’s identity.

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A discussion of “The New Yellow Peril” plotlines of Marvel TV series , Daredevil and Iron FIst.

THE FISTS OF WHITE MEN

With a cast of heroes that includes a woman and a Black man, diversity should be The Defenders’s strong suit, but the show positions a nebulous Asian organization as the villain; considers white saviors, including Iron Fist and Daredevil, as the only people capable of keeping New York City from crumbling; and relies on Orientalism as a plot device.

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Malec and the Burden of Representation

Too much of this article is written from Alec’s point of view, but this is otherwise a solid examination of why LGBTQ representation matters, especially when it comes to Magnus Bane.

Alec, one of the series main shadowhunters, is in the closet and the reasons for it are almost too many to count. From his society’s aggressive homophobia and an unquestionable loyalty to his family’s legacy to a fear of rejection and an emotionally confusing parabatai bond with fellow shadowhunter Jace, it’s easy to understand why he’d want to keep his sexuality a secret. Especially when it comes to Jace, with whom he shares an ambiguous bond complicated by the fact that one-half is gay and the other is not, in a culture that prohibits romance between them.

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This article discusses why race was such an important feature in Shadow Moon’s story.

American Gods and the Realities of Race

…However, Sava’s words only work first to mirror the majority of Americans who are still living in this country with heads in the sand concerning race. They then dismiss a vital component of Shadow’s purpose in the story as both a dark-skinned character in modern America and as a bearer of an important Norse tradition. Sava mostly tries to whitewash the importance of the scene, which is worse than a Texas school board on an American history book.

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Its been a whole minute since I made a Tumblr post, so here, have some interesting thoughts, memes, and photos, that came across my dashboard:

Yes, I am lactose intolerant, although I am to understand that I have a fairly mild case. I can eat some dairy items like yogurt, ice cream, and cheese, without wishing I would die, but a glass of chocolate milk would probably send me to the hospital, with excruciating abdominal pain. But for real though, most cases of lactose intolerance just end in lots of farting.

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This is funny because this was sort of my thoughts while watching this movie. Earth, and the aliens, are basically a bunch of drama queens.

I know we’re always talking about how Pacific Rim embraces the ridiculousness of the human race because “just build a giant robot to punch them in the face” is probably the most full-on human bullshit response we could have thought of to an invasion of giant aliens, but can we pause and also consider that the aliens are basically doing the same thing

like they wanted to invade us and their first thought about how to do so was “let’s genetically engineer giant fucking monsters that will crawl out of the depths of the ocean and trample cities”

Pacific Rim is just the story of two species that on a scale from 1 to 10 respond to every problem with a 17

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The mildly annoying fighting styles of female action characters. I think Charlize Theron, and a couple of others, are leading this charge to make female fight scenes more realistic to how a woman might actually kick some ass. Most filmmakers try to give women pretty, ballet -like, fighting styles, and I don’t mind that a whole lot, but they need to know it’s okay to show women getting down and dirty, when they fight, too. This is why I loved the movie Kill Bill, because it showcased a variety of women vs. women fighting styles.

So whenever i would watch movies and see The Badass Female Character fighting in various ways, something about it always bugged me. I just assumed it was internalized misogyny that made me dislike characters like black widow and Tauriel and tried to make myself like them.

Then I was rewatching Mad Max Fury Road the other day and I noticed that nothing bothered me about watching Furiosa fight and I realized the problem wasn’t watching women fight in movies that got on my nerves.

Watching the stereotypical Badass Female Character she always has these effortless moves and a cocky, sexy smirk on her face as everything is easy. Watching Furiosa, she grunted and bared her teeth. Her fighting was hard and it took effort and it hurt like fighting is supposed to. For once her fighting style wasn’t supposed to seduce the audience it was to be effective.

I wasn’t disliking these characters because they were women I was disliking that their fighting was meant to remind me they were women. High heels and shapely outfits and not showing effort or discomfort because it’s more attractive to effortlessly lift a long leather clad leg over your head rather than rugby tackle someone.

It’s the same with the Wonder Woman movie too. Fighting is hard and it takes effort, blocking bombs and bullets with a shield makes her grimace and bare her teeth with the effort it takes. She’s not flip kicking bombs she’s yelling and straining, not because she’s weak or bad at fighting but because that’s what it would be like.

I really hope we’re moving into an era of women having fighting styles designed for realism and not how hot it looks for the men in the audience.

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I’d say the answer to this is yes. America has long been obsessed with the Black female body, while trying to pretend it’s not, and here’s why:

Colonialism introduced Europe as the cultural/aesthetic authority on values including beauty. While doctors in ancient times warned against obesity, diet culture began in the 1800s. Weight turned into a cultural status marker that considered fat to be negative. Whiteness as the epitome of beauty imposes a standard that devalues body types by race, gender, shape, size, and color. Society teaches women to deal with fatness through exercise. Nevertheless, Black feminists see Blackness as the site of resistance to the standards.

Society interprets Blackness as indicative of moral, sexual, and racial pollution. For example, a society threatened by Black women’s reproductive capabilities, 19th century Europe likened Black women to prostitutes through the controlling image of the Black Venus, which characterized her as the perpetual prostitute. Society discouraged coupling between Black women and White men through “blood discourses” that projected the fear of Blackness onto mixed-race children. Some sociologists remarked on this phenomena with Meghan Markle.

Society treats Black women’s bodies as a danger to social order. On the one hand, they might displace white women as the archetypical love and sex object. On the other, they threatened the patriarchal order of worker by having the status of worker and woman.

Society robs fat Black women of their sexual agency

Sociologist Shirley Anne Tatediscusses how we can read the iconic Venus statue as a fat Black woman. This perspective reveals which Black women’s’ bodies society reads as fat and how they represent them. Tate embraces an ‘alter/native’ view of Black women to highlight the multiplicity of body politics around Black womanhood. Society treats Black women’s bodies as other to white women’s and does so by making their forms hypervisible. This process simultaneously renders the whiteness of other women’s bodies invisible. As a result, Shirley Anne Tate argues this perspective: “enable[s] us to see that there is a corporeality of white class (Bourdieu, 1988) and gender with thinness as its epitome” (Tate 2015: 80).

The Mammy portrays Black women as undesirable sexually and desirable for service work. The Mammy symbolizes the status of a domestic servant to a white woman through her girth and dark skin. This controlling image reinforces the perception that white women were superior. For example, Hattie McDaniel played a Mammy figure in Gone With the Wind. The UK has a similar portrayal Black women as “Big Mama. Fat Black women live in a society that paints them as undesirable and worthy of disgust. These beliefs divided fat Black women into domestic and care workers and thin white women into the domestic and care overseers.

Society ridicules Black women for their fatness

In the UK racist humor often revolves around fat Black women. In the 19th century White men dressed in drag to mimic Black women for racist ridicule, making fun of the notion of a desire for this body through minstrelsy. Far from being just a joke, racist humor has more sinister implications:

“Humour is not a harmless or benign form of communication. Rather, ‘racist humour, jokes may act as a type of coping mechanism for the racist, in the form of a palliative because the effects of joking allow for the expression, reinforcement and denial of racism’ (Weaver, 2011: 12). “ (Tate 2015: 91).

Society treats muscular Black women with dark skin with fear

Whenever the former First Lady chose to wear a sleeveless outfit, some members of White society reacted to Michelle Obama’s muscular arms:

The struggle over Michelle Obama’s ‘right to (bear) bare arms’ shows that the USA is far from being post-race as the respectable femininity of the First Lady is judged by white, middle/upper-class privilege which insists on lack of musculature on women (Tate 2012:93).

Shirley Anne Tate argues Michelle Obama’s body defines norms of white upper/middle-class respectability. Her very presence creates a space of resistance that represents a deviation from the somatic norms of the U.S. First Lady. As a result, she endured a constant surveillance of her body, viewed as an outsider. Therefore, this fascination transforms her into the Black First Lady.

Why do people fetishize muscular Black women?

Black women’s muscle as a spectacle dates back to racist pseudoscience of the 18th/19th century. Shirley Anne Tate describes Black women’s bodies as a site of fascination. A person compares themselves and others to a norm. As a viewer, a person extends their own bodies through their gaze. They interpret others through points on their body like their face, muscles, or skin. Comparison of one’s body parts to another leads a person to determine how close or different one’s body is to others:

Inassimilability or extension into the other does not mean that fasci- nation ceases. Fascination continues in the desire to find out the why of assimilation and the untranslatability of the body. Why can’t I be like her? Why do I want to be like her? What have I become? Is my becoming accompanied by fear, disgust, contempt? Fascination makes us look at ourselves first and foremost, at our very lives, to find out why we are fascinated by bodies/body parts. It is in the exchange between bodies, in the matching and untranslatability that we can begin to know ourselves, begin to understand our fascination as a pull to knowing the other, to get behind the façade that is the skin to ‘the real them’ beneath (Tate 2012: 94).

Fascination leads to a desire to find out why a woman’s body does not conform to the norm. However, narcissism motivates this fascination. Hence, people recenter themselves as they gaze upon others’ bodies to construct a sense of self. Therefore, the incorporeality of fascination makes it a fluid, simultaneous process of becoming and unbecoming through comparison to others.

How does fascination with Black women turn into fear?

Fascination is a multisensory experience that has varying degrees of effect and affect, motivated thus making the gaze a result of both desire and disgust. Therefore, fascination compels a response on the part of a viewer as it occurs not only through the senses but also through imaginings.

As a result, people pursue a means to satisfy their fascination. For example, this fascination extends to dark-skinned Black women who have muscular bodies. This affects interpersonal interactions across racial lines. Stereotypes about Black women motivate people to approach them with a feeling of insecurity or a desire to avoid her at all costs. So when Black woman’s bodies get policed in this manner, they are cast as evil and transgressive to indicate they fall outside the norms of appropriate ways of life.

Tate writes that “once it is set outside the norm it remains as it is cast, an unknowable hyper-known, knowledge of which remains within the colonial stereotype.” White people project their fear of getting displaced in society’s racial hierarchy onto Black women through a racialization process that involves creating zones of containment by labeling her a source of fear.

How is fearing Black women racist?

Groups use fear to maintain racial regimes through the restriction of the movement of others’ bodies. Additionally, they expand their own movement. However, this involves a “racial regime of visible whiteness [that] must be kept in place to ensure that the borders of whiteness are kept firm.”Furthermore, this produces a fear of racial mixing. Rather than mix interracial, they develop resemblances through what Tate names racialized aesthetic profiling:

So expert surveillance is set up of Black women’s bodies, noses, lips, hair, skin colour, breasts, bottoms and muscles so as to mark difference and develop racialized aesthetic profiling. Racialized aesthetic profiling means that fear can be materialized in all Black women’s bodies irre- spective of who they are. This ensures the continuation, circulation and amplification of fear of the Black woman’s body as she begins to move outside of the borders established through the phenotype and stereotype (Tate 2012: 98).

One such Black woman who suffers this fascination is Serena Williams. Serena, in particular, embraced a “girly” sports aesthetic, which contradicted social norms about appropriate muscularity for women. Yet, society characterizes women with darker skin as undesirable. Serena faces derogatory comments for posing as feminine. Nevertheless, muscular Black women experience fetishization just as fat and slim women experience hypersexualization.

Race and the sociology of emotions

The white affective matrix confers and questions womanhood as the view Black women’s bodies with varying degrees of adoration and disgust. As a result, Black women experience different treatment based on their body type.

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These affirmations of allyship are exactly my sentiments too. I want LGBTQ people, Non-Black PoC, people with disabilities, everyone to experience all the same emotions I experience when I think of the movie Black Panther. I am deeply, and profoundly happy for Jewish female representation in Wonder Woman, Black gay men in Moonlight, Queer Latinas in Brooklyn 99, and Asians in Crazy Rich Asians, even though I’m none of those things. Everyone deserves to see themselves beautifully represented on a movie screen.

I hope the success of Wonder Woman doesn’t just mean more women are directing superhero movies, but are given the chance to direct/write movies from the many other franchises that exist like Mission Impossible, Transformers, Star Wars, Anything in this Dark Universe Universal is doing, a big budget Monster movie with Godzilla and King Kong, James Bond, I heard they are rebooting Resident Evil let’s let a talent woman director like Jennifer Kent with her horror background tackle that, Terminator (cause they just won’t ever let that go), Alien, Fast and Furious, and so many other I can’t even name them all. Or you know give them a big budget to adapt a popular book like Ava DuVernay is currently doing with A Wrinkle in Time, or let them have their own stories we need more original voices, or let them build their own unique franchises. And if they fail, let them try again cause lord knows even the best male directors and writers fail at times and they are still given multiple chances. We all should celebrate Wonder Woman’s success, but know it’s not the end of a long journey to true equality for women in Hollywood.

I hope that Black Panther is a *smashing* success and that it leads to not only more POC directing superhero movies, but also being given the chance to direct/write movies from the many other existing franchises and adaptations. Plus, let them have their own stories and build their own unique franchises, we need their voices. And if they fail, let them try again cause lord knows even the best white directors and writers fail at times and they are still given multiple chances. Hopefully we’ll all be able to celebrate Black Panther’s success, but even if it breaks every box office record, it won’t be the end of a long journey to true equality for POC in Hollywood.

I hope that Crazy, Rich Asians is a roaring success. I hope it leads to doing away with the whitewashing of Asians in Asian properties (I’m talking to you, Netflix: White Light in Death Note? NO!). I would love to see Asians being able to break out of the “smart Asian friend” and “inspiring immigrant story” roles. I want to see Asian representation in CBMs. I want to see more than Japanese, Chinese, and Indian people as doctors, lawyers, shop owners, and financiers on the way up. And while we’re at it: Pacific Islanders are not replacements for Asians, and they don’t just play football and dance. Representation matters, and it has to be more than what makes Hollywood comfortable.

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From the comments on this one, I’d say the answer is a resounding YES!!!! Yes, White people, do indeed, get tired of looking at White people onscreen sometimes, and are just as hungry for new perspectives on old stories, as PoC.

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This pretty much was the permanent oven setting in our house. Hell, it was a major source of anxiety for me to turn the oven to 375 degrees, that first time.

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This conversation started out talking about how terrifying angels are, and then went in the direction of the running commentary, on Tumblr, about how murderously dangerous is the wildlife in Australia.

Basically, when the people writing Scripture tried to describe what they saw when they saw an angel… they run into the end of their imagination… they can never quite seem to fully explain it because they had trouble even comprehending what they saw, let alone being able to describe it to someone else.

I used to listen to this radio show and one thing I remember because it was so funny was a Christmas special where an angel showed up to tell the shepherds about the birth of Christ. The conversations went:

So demons are fallen angels but they don’t look scary because they’re fallen, that’s just what all angels look like…

Maybe that’s why so many Christians see visions of Saints or the Virgin Mary instead…like Jesus is all…no, no see being human made me realize sending Angels might not be the best idea. I don’t know if humans can handle this. So I’m gonna just send mom

Jesus: It’s either Mom or the thousand eyed flaming wheel, Dad, do you really think the humans are gonna be chill with that when they’re terrified of spiders already?

God: Hey now, some of those spiders eat birds.

Jesus: …Dad…

God: …To be fair, Australian wildlife was my dark creation phase.

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I touched on this in an earlier post, about Hollywood treating Nazis like a story prompt for the past fifty years, in everything from comedies, to action movies, has led to Americans seriously diminishing their influence, obscuring their crimes, and complacency, with their ideas.

never forget that narratives that follow “what if the nazis won” are never for those of us who faced their terror- they are for tourists to our suffering, people who wish to be saviors. no jew every gets to succeed alone in a story where nazis win- we, rromas, lgbt people, and disabled people are shunted to the sidelines, in an eternal genocide from which we cannot escape. they forget the persecution that we still face- to them, to the tourists, this is clever. to them, we are helpless. we cannot fight nazis, that’s why they won.

this is a false retelling of history, and YES, in ALL CASES, it is a glorification of nazis. they DIDN’T win because they COULDN’T. and to my jewish, rroma, lgbt, and disabled followers, they lost because WE FOUGHT. We closed camps with our riots. We killed nazis. We scalped them. Our stories aren’t told because every tourist wants to act like they would Stop The Nazis- WE were doing it LONG before anyone came to our aid.

Don’t let people fool you into thinking you are helpless. Don’t let narratives that put white, straight, able-bodied and able-minded characters at the forefront make you think you need them.

Superman was originally created as a gollum- A character of jewish magic who protects us. He is not Christ, he is not Goy, he is not Theirs. We are our own protectors. We are a community, a family, and a riot. You don’t not have to accept the idea that the Nazis could’ve won. Because the only thing Nazis are good at is dying. And the only thing a person who writes this storyline is good at is violence.

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A call out post on fandoms faux-progressivism. I think I wrote about how fandom isn’t nearly as imaginative, in its treatment of characters, as they like to believe they are, and that the vast majority merely reproduce the same racist and stereotypical narratives they’ve seen in popular media, since its inception. They just don’t have enough imagination to create anything outside of the boxes that have been created for them to play in.

Many of them are in the business of upholding the status quo, too. And far too many think being progressive is just writing about two white men, having sex, or holding hands, and that’s as far as they need to go to be considered woke. Anytime fandom ignores canon gay relationships of PoC, in a show or movie, my argument is that their insistence on slashing every white man who merely wanders into the orbit of another for longer than a minute or two, amounts to nothing more than a straight girl fetish, which parallels the straight male obsession with lesbians.

We are supposed to be the most progressive and transformative community in pop-culture.

We who…

Hyper-focus on white, male characters

Contort these male characters into heteronormativity

Marginalize and erase characters of color

Write out women and replace them with men, especially in shipping

Attack women for “getting in the way” of our preferred ships

Hold female characters to higher standards than male characters

Hold characters of color to higher standards than white characters

Latch onto any single excuse to marginalize female characters

Utilize any single excuse to demonize characters of color

Put women on pedestals and act as if we’re doing them a favor

Justify white and male abuses or dismiss them as “mistakes”

Use actual mistakes to denigrate female and non-white characters

Romanticize white, male pain and mental illness

Expect female characters to perform all the emotional labor

Expect characters of color to be perfectly mentally healthy forever

Expect everyone to subsume their own mental health for the white males’

Dismiss the traumas and experiences of characters of color

Minimize the achievements of female characters

And then we wonder why mainstream media is so regressive, especially compared to us. We all talk as if mainstream media creators are behind the times.

They’re not.

Fandom likes to imagine itself as being progressive because of all the slash – a mechanism of progress which conveniently boils down to extra attention on overwhelmingly male (and overwhelmingly white) characters. This form of progress is one which takes a minor deviation from the social norm (homosexuality), only to end up ultimately supporting or even amplifying the status quo, by virtue of over-focusing on male characters (and over-representing white ones in the process).

Strip back that gay window dressing, though, and you’ll see that at best, fandom is just as socially stagnant as mainstream media and mainstream culture – or even worse, by virtue of engaging in media that overwhelmingly sidelines several other marginalized groups in order to prop up one.

Professional women have long known the old adage, “Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought of half as good.” What no one seems to realize is that fandom is still doing exactly the same thing.

We expect female characters to be twice as good for half the acclaim, we expect characters of color to be three times as good for a third of the acclaim, and we let white, male characters be only a quarter as good for four times the acclaim.

Mainstream media is keeping up with the times and with social progress just fine, it’s us who’ve deluded ourselves into believing that we, as a community, are more progressive than we actually are.

It’s been a while, but since this post just got a bunch of notes recently, I figure this is as good a time as any to add on some more thoughts.

Comparative Progressivism

Historically speaking, fandom has been progressive when compared to mainstream media. What most people don’t realize is just how little that’s really saying. When mainstream media is built on white male heteronormative power fantasy, it’s easy for any “alternative” depiction to come off as progressive.

A world where most of the women are fag-hags is certainly progressive compared to a world where most of the women are walking sex toys. That does not mean we should settle for this as a good depiction of women, or the marginalization of female characters.

Same goes for race. A character of color who is not a stereotype while supporting a white character is certainly better than a world where characters of color are stereotypes who are subsumed by white characters. That does not mean we should accept these as good representation of POC, or settle for their marginalization – or ignore their demonization as racism rears its ugly head, anew, in fandom.

And quite frankly, for a community where the overwhelming majority of our stories are based on mlm relationships, it speaks a lot to our internal attitudes and beliefs that we still, even after decades of existence, continue to write gay relationships as straight relationships with different genitals. The subtle heteronormativity that permeates the gay relationship tropes of fandom are astounding, and sometimes reek of internalized misogyny.

We Are All Joss Whedon

Joss Whedon was once considered tremendously feminist, and hailed as a paragon and idol of feminism in mainstream media. But contemporary analysis of his works shows that feminism was often a shroud covering some serious fetishization and occasional bursts of downright misogyny – and somewhat more disconcerting is the fact that more and more, his current works demonstrate that he hasn’t progressed forward from this much, if at all.

Fandom is the same.

We have long prided ourselves upon a history of progressivism and being transformative. It certainly was, back in era of Star Trek slash in an era where homosexuality was still illegal in many parts of America and the world. Fandom was truly transgressive when it wrote content that challenged such a deeply entrenched status quo. Even the most misogynistic and heteronormative portrayal of a gay relationship was transgressive against the staunch heteronormativity of mid-20th century mainstream media.

“Was.”

Because we’re still writing a lot of our fics on that model. Take a look at how many people debate hotly on who in a gay pairing is “the top” and “the bottom”. They are rarely ever discussing the hypotheticals of which male finds a certain sex position/act physically pleasurable. They’re asking, which one is the penetrative and active partner, and which is the receptive and passive partner. They’re asking which one is the “dominant” and which one is the “submissive” partner (with terms like ‘power bottom’ still relying on those baselines). They’re asking, “which one is the man and which one is the woman”. *( And often engaging in racialized transphobia and homophobia, by casting any people of color in inter-racial relationships, as the “top”, who is often described as bigger, and more muscular looking, than their slighter, more feminine/ effeminate same sex partner. This goes for both mlm, and wlw, relationships.

Meanwhile, actual female characters are rarely more than props to the men’s emotional health and personal narrative. A lot of them are written as little more than a fag hag or a “Straight BFF”.

We’ve gone from characters of color being walking stereotypes in the white characters’ narrative, to characters of color being either obstacles or non-existent in the white characters’ narratives. We don’t expect characters of color to literally serve the white characters while saying “yes, massa” all the time, now – but we still expect characters of color to to subsume themselves to white characters, with white characters’ feelings coming ahead of their own mental and physical health, their safety, and sometimes even their lives. Characters of color who have the audacity to act with a fraction of the self-absorption that is routine for white characters are castigated for being irresponsible and selfish.

This is if they’re even included at all. Ranging from marginalization to outright demonization, fandom constantly sidelines characters of color. Some fandoms have the unique anti-honor of being more racist – more sociall conservative, more prejudiced, and sometimes even more bigoted – than the mainstream media source material. Think about that for a minute. Mainstream media is finally moving forward and fandom is staying right where it is.

Fandom Wants the 1960s Back

Fandom can talk about feminism and progressivism all it wants. The reality of the true desires of fandom as a collective and as a community are expressed in its fanworks – not only in what is created in the first place, but which works become popular and get attention…and which ones don’t.

Fandom wants a world where white men are still front and center of everyone’s attention, where women are kickass but their stories aren’t that interesting, and where POC don’t need any care or attention.

Peel back the white mlm fetishization, and fandom hasn’t budged more than an inch since the first slashy Star Trek zines. Joss Whedon’s got nothing on us.

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I read an interesting article that stated, one of the reasons that the Civil Rights Movement was successful, was because of the progression of technology. Basically, the invention of portable hand held cameras, in the 50s, which allowed the media to be on the scene, up front and center, when riots, marches, or any type of civil unrest was occurring, instead of photographers who showed up after the fact. It allowed the media to film, in real time, exactly how Black people were being treated in America by the police, and it provoked a global response. Some of the global response to such images is what helped to promote the passing of the Civil Rights Bill. I don’t know if this is true but it was an interesting thought.

With the invention of camera phones, and apps that record our deaths in real time, one would expect an equal progression on racial issues, along with the technology, and there is some. Certainly there’s a greater degree of awareness about how we’re treated, that media news cameras were unable, and in some cases, unwilling to capture. Now, images of Black death and brutality are everywhere in social media, but there has been no corresponding progress in empathy from White people.

In some cases, watching some of these videos, has become for some White people, little more than pain porn, or virtue signalling. In some instances, the prominence, and easily availability of such images, has had the side effect of producing a defensive White-lash from some people, who don’t want to admit that they don’t care about Black lives (or any lives but their own, really), are content with the status quo, yet are too ashamed to admit that they are callous, soulless, individuals, because they still want others to see them as “good” people.

Black pain and degradation has always been on display. It has always made great spectacle for a certain class of people. High visibility does not mean that Black Americans have power. There are those who use the spectacles of of our brutality to try to make themselves look good to others, and those who are certainly willing to watch Black pain, can sympathize with it, and yet, are content to do nothing but emote about it on Facebook, because it’s not something that directly affects them.

And then, there are those non-Black people of color who mistake attention and visibility, for power, and think we should also do the free labor of speaking out on their behalf, while never having spoken on ours.

This is from one of the more mature discussions about race I’ve seen on Tumblr. (It’s been my observation that most of the people there are too young, and lack enough nuance, to be able to hold deep discussions on the topic, but sometimes there are exceptions.)

Anonymous asked:

People are still burning over how we got “too much attention in Charlottesville,” and I’m like, …? What people don’t realize is that attention is fruitless. Our suffering makes good clickbait, but nothing’s really being done about it unless we do it. And all that attention just gets us the envy and bitterness of other groups who insist there’s a checklist of things we not only have to fight for, but things we have to put *before* our own lives.

I think that part of the problem is that there is a lack of education about black people, a lot of people really don’t see us as people they’re willing to learn about. I think there is a problem with people conflating Imperialism with “American” and they take it out on minorities that are based in the U.S. because we’re an easier target. And I also think a lot of non-black people internalized that racism against us because it is so engrained all over the world so that informs their opinions of us. So they only go off of the little bit they’re taught about us in school or see in the media. I feel like they they believe that anti-black racism is something we deserve, and the point is to avoid being tread like us more than it is to stop white supremacy all together. However, I think things go a little deeper than that.

I believe that they don’t know (or don’t care) about the way anti-black voyeurism has been an instrumental part of white supremacy in the U.S. So they see a bunch of pictures of our dead bodies and some crying people and think “oh folks care about *them*.” They don’t realize that people were passing around images of our lynched bodies for hundreds of years and people still didn’t care, there still weren’t consequences, no one stood up for us. It was an acceptable part of our existence in this society. They don’t realize that the way that they talk to us and react to us is directly affected by the idea that violence and hostility are our lot in life and the only way we can relate to people.

So they get envious because their histories are different than ours. They forget that we live in this strange dichotomy where we are both visible and invisible at the same time. We’re visible as targets, and invisible as victims. We are everywhere when folks want to make ahistorical claims of oppression we “inflicted” on others but we don’t exist when they want to erase our contributions to their communities or when they want to appropriate our history to a more “deserving” minority group. People will spread pictures of dead black children but won’t show up to support us when we want justice, worse, they’ll argue how we deserved to be victimized. They want us loud and visible to fight battles, but refuse to give us the credit (only the blame if the activism isn’t perfect or something goes wrong). They want us to know everything about their cultures but they don’t know a thing about us beyond what racist media tells them.

Heck, the only time I’ve seen people really focus on black people is when they want to tell us we’re doing something wrong or leaving someone out. I’ve never seen non-black people focus on black people in a way that has helped us. People who have never overtly supported black people a day in their life have this misconception of our privilege and obligations, because they honestly don’t relate to us as suffering *people* with priorities as much as they see us as a social justice customer service line they can call and rant at. Case in point: Look at how many people will talk about how *others feel* but will never examine how we feel or what we’re facing.

But its not just their fault: They weren’t property so they don’t get how our race gets us attention because we were primary targets, not because people wanted to help us. Black skin was equated with whatever negative qualities they could project on to us to justify our enslavement. When we were enslaved, our race meant that anyone who was black could be kidnapped and sold into slavery even if they were free. We were criminalized by laws just for being black and not working for the same people who owned us after slavery was made “illegal” after the Civil War. We’ve always had “attention”. We could never “assimilate”. We had to be visible to survive, because the moment we were silent they could destroy all of us and the world wouldn’t bat an eye. We had a precarious existence here, and a lot of people don’t realize that because they were never in our position. They might have been oppressed in other ways, but they were never *property*. The U.S. didn’t base the countries prosperity on their enslavement so they don’t get how visibility works here.

They don’t realize that our visibility has never been a privilege, because they experience racism in different ways than we do, and that they don’t have to act hostile towards us, and erase our history just to bring visibility to other people.

tl;dr: I think that people let their anti-black bias inform how they relate to us, but I also feel like they don’t understand that visibility doesn’t work as a privilege for us like it might for others who have a different history here in the U.S. A lack of education is definitely to blame and they need to take the initiative to practice what they preach when it comes to solidarity (and intersectionality) and learn how our visibility informs our reality as black people in the U.S. and that needs to be a central part of anti-racism discourse.

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*Okay, I just want everyone to prepare themselves for the influx of assholes, who will be in your tags and inboxes, on the exact date of February 17th, (the day after the release of the movie Black Panther) just to declare how unfeminine, and masculine coded, the Dora Milaje are, or how they love and admire them, because they are so strong and independent, and don’t need romance. Or paradoxically, how the Dora Milaje isn’t feminist, because they willingly serve a patriarchal kingship. People, with only the most rudimentary understanding of feminism, will be writing treatise long essays,about how the Black women in the movie are so badly written, and how Lupita’s character and Chadwick Boseman have no chemistry..

And I’m warning you now, the charge will be lead by young White women, who lack knowledge of intersectional politics, or a nuanced understanding of feminism, who are pretending to be progressive, and concerned. You can argue with them if you want to, but remember, the Block button is always available, when the bullshit gets out of hand. When you feel your mind start to unravel from the nonsense, don’t argue. Just block!

The “White Feminist” bullshit has already started regarding Valkyrie from Thor Ragnarok. I apologise in advance for subjecting your eyeballs to the following argument. (Feel free to check out at any point after the second paragraph, cuz its a shitshow of several isms.) This topic was already addressed by Stitch’s Media Mix (on her blog,) so I’ll follow her lead, and not link to the author’s name, but here is the original post and some of the other responses:

I finally realized what bothered me so much about about Thor: Ragnarok. Well, aside for all Thor’s characterization that went out the window in favour of him being a blumbering idiot who has no idea how to respectfully speak to a woman. Or the poor language choices, but I hope that was a problem with the Italian adaptation and Thor didn’t actually speak like a dumb teenager.

Anyway, my problem was with Valkyrie, more specifically with the fact she’s male coded. Heavily so.

Let me explain: there is this war veteran, who is drunk in the very first scene, whose fight buddy, who was supposedly its female love interest, died in the last war and said veteran became a rogue, violent drunkard lost in an empty life polar opposite to the past of gretness and honour of before, a past said fighter doesn’t want to be reminded of.

How many male characters are there in cinematography with this same, boring, pathethic story?

The only difference between them and Valkyrie is that she has a female body. But only that, her body, because nothing in her behaviour, gestures, way of speech or anything at all shows the slightest hint of female feelings or qualities. Loki is more feminine than she is (which is arguably intended by both writing and acting, but that’s another matter). Gosh, even Thor has feminine bits and pieces!

My point is, Valkyrie’s character was written exactly like a “tragic male character”, then they took a female actress for the role because they realized they didn’t have enough female speaking characters (read: none other than Hela) to pass the Bechedel test. Spoiler alert! They still don’t.

Look, the Bechdel test needs to stop being invoked as the end-all be-all marker of well-written female interaction. Not that Thor gets off the hook for this, because no two female characters ever really interact with substance (though it’s notable that the two female characters who did interact—Topaz and Val—are women of color) but that’s not really your point, OP, is it?

So back to Valkyrie being a male character in a female body, I….yikes. So much wrong with this statement. Reading Valkyrie as heavily male-coded means we’re assuming that women can’t have alcohol dependencies, that they can’t be powerful and flawed, that tragedy and fear and trauma as a result of war are sole domains of men, that women can’t or shouldn’t have the same complicated and flawed existences as many male characters do. Do we need a woman onscreen to, idk, nurture someone or reference her inferior upper body strength in order to be classified “feminine”? Did we need her to make a boob joke like Bruce did for Nat in AoU? Did we need her to use her ~wiles~ to trick someone or be a sexpot? I think you’re ascribing to a very binary understanding of gender qualities, and perpetuating some harmful stereotypes with this idea…after all, Valkyries are referenced by Thor as an elite force of female warriors—that they’re women is a significant factor. She is a Valkyrie. She is a woman. She gets a moment where we see her brush her hand over the Grandmaster’s cheek and he blushes in satisfaction. We see Thor try and preen for her as a show of attraction. We see Bruce call her “so beautiful.” We see her femininity in other people’s reactions to her, and that’s enough. Everything else is gravy because the story doesn’t need or doesn’t rely on any tired tropes of femininity to move forward.

No matter what black women do y’all racists will always see us as “too masculine” lmao. And you vision of what is or is not “feminine” seems pretty sexist op. Not to mention, since when are tragic soldier backstories only meant for men? It’s actually refreshing that for once, a woman gets the “turns rogue after being traumatized by the war and the fact that she’s the only survivor of her faction, but eventually joins the hero to fight the villain” storyline.

*Valkyrie sounds very like the character Jessica Jones, who is also a flawed, complex woman, who has been through severe trauma, and copes by drinking. Jessica is also stronger than most men, is unsympathetic to other people’s emotions (too busy dealing with her own), doesn’t act in a traditionally feminine manner, and yet, not once did I ever hear her being called “unfeminine” or “male-coded”. In fact, she was lauded as the epitome of feminism by White women fans. (I personally can’t stand the character but I get why she’s important to others.)

Then there’s Charlize Theron’s Atomic Blonde, and Fury Road’s Furiosa, all hailed as feminist highpoints in cinema. Not once did I find any essays declaring that Charlize Theron lacks femininity, or that her story was too masculine coded. So, in light of the reception of Theron to the ranks of movie action heroines, it will be interesting to see what White female fans will think of the Dora Milaje, Taraji P Henson’s character, Proud Mary, which will be released in January, and Deadpool II’s Domino character, played by Zazie Beetz.

Never mind that plenty of Black girls and women will look up to Valkyrie, played by a Black woman (of Cuban descent), that they’re arguing has no use, because her character doesn’t fit their standard of White European femininity, (which is an utterly ridiculous admonishment, because her character is an alien from another planet. What the hell does masculine coded even mean in that context?)

One of the primary reasons, (among many), that that critique is so horribly wrong, is because it falls right in line with the Masculine Black woman stereotype, (which, ironically, seems to be something that both Black men, and White men and women, can all get together to agree on). This is an insult that has followed any Black women who White people perceive as even the slightest bit threatening, from Venus Williams (my idol) to Michelle Obama. Woven into the accusations of being too masculine are threads of transphobia, and misogyny, as well as racism.

“The type of body-shaming in Tarpishchev’s comment, while subtle, comes gift-wrapped in a triad from hell: misogyny, racism and transphobia. By referring to the Williams sisters as “brothers,” Tarpishchev resurrected the tired notion that black women are unattractive because we are more “masculine” than other women and are “indistinguishable” from men. These types of jokes are used to say that black women aren’t “real women,” that there’s something just not right about our bodies, not feminine enough, too muscular, too “scary” and that we’re worth less because of it. Look at radio host Sid Rosenberg, who called Serena an “animal.” Imagine how many black women are internalizing these messages. There’s little difference between Tarpishchev’s words and the transphobic slur the late Joan Rivers used to slam First Lady Michelle Obama, calling her a “tr*nny.” Both use black women and trans people as the butt of a body-policing joke.

*(While searching for articles on the topic above, I had to scroll through all manner of racist garbage, that so pissed me off… well, basically, do NOT do that shit, if you value having low blood pressure.)

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My response is a little off topic, but I wanted to address the two twitter hashtags for Game of Thrones referenced in this post. You have to check them out. They are hilarious, and totally from a Black American perspective.

I initially resisted watching the show. I just wasn’t interested, which is weird because yeah, I am a geek, and required, by some type of natural law, to automatically like such shows. I only started watching it at the behest of, ironically, a White girl-friend from work. It wasn’t until after I started regularly watching the show, that I discovered there was this huge Black component of the fandom, who really, really loved this show! And I only found that out because I was looking for reviews by Black critics and stumbled across one by accident.

Other people would be puzzled by Black fans love of the show, but I’m not. GoT is kinda like a White mashup of Scandal and Empire, with ice zombies, and dragons. Now if we could only transport Cookie Lyons to that world, she would have things whipped into shape, by the end of the season. (Cookie is more terrifying than any dragon!)

Over the weekend I binge-watched 3%, a dystopian sci-fi Netflix original set in Brazil. The plot was rife with quirks and unexpected turns, but the biggest surprise of all was that the diversity in the show reflected the diversity in Brazil. The cast featured myriad shades and races, absent the stereotypical casting, such as the confinement of black and brown actors and actresses to supporting characters with botched, surface-level backstories.

*And oh yeah, according to actual Historians, the term “Historical Accuracy” can no longer be used as an excuse for not adding Black and Brown people to fantasy narratives. It’s past time to retire that fucking term! If your mind can wrap around orcs, dragons, elves and ice zombies, then you should have absolutely no problem dealing with the idea that PoC also exist in a fantasy world.

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*I always love reading about Black people’s excitement for this movie. I have often referred to the release date of this movie as “The Ascension”, so you can see I have already lost my everlovin-mind about this movie.

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* I just finished playing this, and it’s a helluva lot of fun. (Its also hilarious.) It’s a very simple game, that requires you to “throw some hands”, to protect whatever updo you’ve chosen, from a selection of hairstyles, while you travel to diferent parts ofthe world. You can choose your skin tone, a hairstyle, and the area of the world you’re attempting to travel to, while dodging pale hands that are trying to invade your personal space. You lose energy if the hands make contact for too long. The sheer level of “Bitch, please!”, on that woman’s face, is priceless, (although I suspect this is an expression that most people, of any color, wear at the airport.)

There are still some people who want to victim blame this man for what he’s been through, saying he should’ve hit the man, or hurt him, somehow. People like that are not taking into account that Terry’s situation isn’t any different from the situation of the White women who have been assaulted. He was powerless at the time it happened, and his wife was ready for it. Many blessings upon her for being the level headed woman she is. Sometimes “keepin’ it real” isn’t the smartest response to a situation.

Some of the less smart among us don’t understand that not everything in the world can be solved by hitting someone, and Terry would only have destroyed himself, and his career, by responding with a suckerpunch, and his assailant knew that. In fact, as a Black woman, his wife would probably be intimately familiar with such a dynamic.

Terry is no dumb jock. He clearly states why the optics of race also come into play. A large Black man, hitting a small, (but powerful) White man, who just assaulted him, would not look good in the media. He would’ve lost everything.

For those questioning why he chose now to come out about his assault, he addresses that in the interview, as well.

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*I just wanted to elaborate on this article, that I posted earlier in the year, on the topic of how race is depicted in SFF genre films and shows. No matter how well meaning the filmmakers may be, their blind spot is almost always racial in nature, and it is impossible to completely and fully tell certain narratives, if the creators refuse to even look in the direction of race. I don’t know if it’s intentional, or deliberate, but one of the failures of modern SFF cinema is an inability to approach the subject of racism from an honest perspective, when these creators are White. This is why creators like Jordan Peele, Ava Duverney, John Cho, and even Rod Serling are so important. They did not (do not) ignore race as a factor in the stories they are (were) trying to tell.

Why Don’t Dystopias Know How to Talk About Race?

————Fantasy novelist Daniel José Older sees the problem as a failure of imagination and craft. “I find it very telling how little these worlds that are so much about power and oppression and ways of resistance also magically somehow have solved race,” he said. “On the one hand it’s a truth failure in the sense of it doesn’t feel real to anyone who knows about the lasting power of racism and to anyone who is paying attention to the world today. And it’s a craft failure in that it is a tremendous missed opportunity to develop the world more deeply.”

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* I’ve been seeing an increasing number of SciFi shows where Blacks, and other minorities, are being cast as the oppressors of White protagonists. We’re not arguing that PoC can’t work for oppressive systems, because plenty of them do. And we’re not arguing that PoC cannot discriminate against White people.Yes, we know PoC can be bigots (towards other PoC, mostly) but that’s not what is being discussed here.

We’re talking about the casting of Black people, particularly, dark skinned, Black women, as virulently racist bigots, which is starting to become a trope. From Teen Wolf, to The Gifted, to Heroes Reborn, I think the White male writers who create these shows are starting to get a little too comfortable with this idea.

They don’t seem comfortable with depicting actual racism towards PoC by White people, and they continue to cast White actors as the oppressed minorities in these racial allegories (like The Handmaid’s Tale). It’s especially galling in a racism/slavery allegory, to not only erase the existence of PoC, who are actually experiencing what is being depicted onscreen, in the real world, but to cast them in the roles of the oppressors, and I’m not here for it. I’m also not here for White Writers stealing the narratives of oppressed people of color, but then NOT including any of those oppressed people in the story. (I touched on this briefly in my review of The Gifted.)

One of the major reasons I stopped watching Heroes Reborn wasn’t just because of its lackluster, badly written plot, but because a Black woman was cast as a virulently nasty, hardline racist, who was willing to kill children, and the children they showed her killing, were White. This is the same plotline used in the final season of Teen Wolf, where a Black woman is seen killing and sometimes torturing White teens, and again, in the show The Gifted, you have a brown-skin man, of indeterminate race, spouting racist jargon against the White protagonists of the show, and hunting and arresting White kids. All of these shows steal the narrative of Black and Brown people being killed (shot, tortured, and abused) by people in positions of authority, but does not include any of these Brown people in the story that’s being told. Instead, casting White actors in roles that real PoC actually live out.

The Gifted is even more annoying because there are PoC on the show who are members of the oppressed minority, but we don’t get to see their stories, sympathize with them, or understand what their lives were like. We do get to see them be bravely tortured by the government, which sends the message that not only are our stories available for consumption, but the pain and degradation of PoC is as well.

Just Like A Caucasian

How Sci-Fi and Fantasy Television Shows Always Get Racism Wrong.

————Shabazz Malikali

On Medium.com

**Reprinting my review of The Gifted, (which I wrote before I saw this article)

I’m simply not in the mood for this show, and I’m fed up with this type of plot, now. It’s loosely based on some of the X-Men and New Mutants comic books, in that it has some Sentinel plotline, and some of the characters from those groups. Stephen Moyer stars as a lawyer who used to prosecute mutant criminals, and the father of two young mutants, now on the run from the government, which is rounding up mutants and imprisoning them in scientific camps.

I tried watching the first episodes, and while I like a couple of the characters, the show is simply not compelling enough to keep me watching it every week. The characters have the usual teenage angst, with superpowers, that made me dislike the First X-Men movie. Blink is a teenager who can teleport by creating portals, and Thunderbird, who is Native American, is a kind of tracker of people and things. I’m dismayed that the show used the Native American tracker stereotype, as that’s nothing like Thunderbird’s actual powers in the books, which consists of speed and strength.

And I’m just not here for yet another plotline of people with superpowers being rounded up and used by the government. This seems to be the only plotline they can come up with for superpowered characters, especially on TV, and once again, there is only the focus on how this affects White, suburban, middle-class families.

Just like with the show Heroes, there is no focus on how the discovery of superpowers would affect any marginalized communities, something I would consider much more entertaining, and which the show Cleverman handled with a certain amount of depth. As I complained about before, we keep getting stories about middle-class White characters being subjected to the same oppressions that have been visited on marginalized communities. This show would have had far more depth and been much more interesting if it had been set in the G/L community, or the Black and Latinx communities, in which this type of interment is already occurring.

In the forties, the Japanese were rounded up in internment camps because they were considered a danger to the US, and later, authorities used to raid the gay and lesbian communities and lock them in jails with the full force of legal authority behind them. Today, its immigration officials grabbing random Brown people out of their homes, and locking them up on suspicion of being illegal immigrants. What do you want to bet that none of these things will be addressed in yet another show where we see average White people being treated in the same manner?

*For further reading check out Malikali’s article on The Ellison Test. It’s great reading, and available on Medium.com, (which I can’t link to here.)

The Ellison Test: The litmus test for diversity.

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Another way that TV and movies get racism wrong is the constant message, and I’m not certain this is intentional, is the idea that the people being oppressed actually are powerful and dangerous and need to be controlled. So, while Hollywood steals the narratives of PoC to sell their oppression stories of White people, they paradoxically send the message that the oppression is also deserved. This is what went wrong with the movie Zootopia. Zootopia made some excellent points about discrimination, but the animals being discriminated against are all powerful animals that traditionally eat other animals. There’s also the setup that in the past these animals did indeed eat the lesser animals, and so deserve persecution and fear. So Zootopia is trying to tell a story condemning the discrimination and persecution of others is wrong, it reinforces the idea that the ones being persecuted deserved to be feared and hated.

This is also the same problem I ran into with the X-Men and Mutant hysteria plotlines of The Gifted. The persecuted minority are actually exceptionally powerful beings, and actually can destroy human life, and even the entire world, which goes against the racism metaphor the stories are trying to establish, and defeats the anti-discrimination message that’s being touted.

One story that does get the themes mostly correct is the graphic novel called Maus by Art Spiegelman, in which the Jewish people are represented as helpless prey animals being harmed by cats. The cats are depicted as Nazis.

How Zootopia Gets Its Own Point Exactly Backwards

———–The movie starts with a history of the world, explaining that while predators used to be uncontrollably violent, they have since been civilized and can now live among prey animals, which also means behaving like prey animals (prey animals aren’t asked to accommodate their behavior for predators at all). Because in Zootopia there’s a right way to live and a wrong way to live, and some animals are — in the context of this movie — biologically programmed to live wrong. They have to be corrected in order to fit in with proper, civilized society.

Zootopia wants to teach kids about prejudice. Is it accidentally sending the wrong message?

————–The most natural line to draw between the two is that Zootopia‘s predators stand in for black men in our world, and one needs only look at the resurfacing of Hillary Clinton’s “superpredators” clip from the ’90s to know why that’s potentially inflammatory territory.

But all of this pales in comparison to the fact that when you scrutinize Zootopia‘s core metaphor for even a second, it struggles to make sense on a literal level. Yes, the film’s message is that Judy learns to trust Nick, even though he’s predator and she’s prey. But on some other level, we all know that an actual rabbit is right to be afraid of an actual fox — and that muddies the movie’s message considerably.

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Yes, even Bladerunner manages to fall into this same trap of presenting a persecuted minority as being incredibly physically powerful and smarter than the humans hunting them.

Blade Runner’s source material says more about modern politics than the movie does

It was written for an age of overreaching policing and sociopathic lack of empathy

———-The police in Do Androids Dream…? are merciless, unstoppable android killers. Their victims, in contrast, are remarkably vulnerable and weak. In the film, the replicants have enhanced reflexes, super-strength, and tremendous intelligence. Part of the reason Deckard evokes sympathy is that he’s clearly overmatched. Replicants may not deserve to be murdered, but they are terrifyingly powerful and dangerous. Roy, howling his shirtless way through an abandoned building at the end of the film, is an atavistic, gothic terror. The androids in Blade Runner are dangerous and threatening when provoked — which is how Darren Wilson saw Michael Brown, and the excuse most often given by police who kill unarmed black civilians.

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Race and Blade Runner 2049

The only black people in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner are extras. The replicants are all white, and the city of Los Angeles is basically an unmixed population of whites and Asians. The Asians live on the streets or work in small shops. Whites rule the LAPD (all that’s left of the city’s government) and biotech corporations. Whites are also the slaves manufactured by Tyrell Corporation. There are no black, Mexican, or Asian replicants. And the leader of the rebel replicants is a very Aryan Roy Batty. Replicants, however, are, according to Rick Deckard’s voiceover, called “skin jobs,” which is equivalent to calling black people “niggers.” So, Blade Runner is about a slave revolt. And what do the slaves want? Freedom? No. They want more life, which, to be fair, is another kind of freedom. As the 20th century British philosopher Alfred Whitehead put it: “Life is a bid for freedom.”

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————-I watched Blade Runner for the first time this week. Since I have apparently been living in a cave for the past few decades, I thought that Blade Runner was kind of like Tron but with more Harrison Ford, and less neon, and maybe a few more tricky questions about What Is The Nature Of Man.

That is the movie I was expecting.

That is not the movie I saw.

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*It is far easier for White audiences to watch allegories about racism, than it is for them to actually tackle the subject head-on in their daily lives. Just as it seems easier for White filmmakers to propose the idea that persecution of minorities is wrong, while engaging in erasure and whitewashing in their films on the subject.

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*There has been some discussion on Tumblr of The Empathy Gap, to explain the woobification of White villains in fandom, vs the vilification of Black and Brown villains, and even characters of color that are the stars and protagonists in the narrative. Want to know more, then read on:

Why White People Don’t Like Black Movies

Why White People Don’t Like Black Movies

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*This is a perfect example of what we mean by implicit bias in filmmaking. I know the director of this movie, James Mangold, is not some die-hard ,card carrying, member of the alt-right, or KKK. Nevertheless a critical look at his films reveals his own blindspot when it comes to the subject of race. Because the directors are White males, living in America, they have a tendency to reproduce narratives of race that have always prevailed in films, without much examination. I’m sure it never occurred to Mangold that it would be difficult for PoC to watch a movie in which am entire Black family is brutally murdered by vigilante members of the state. It certainly did not occur to him how such images would impact our watching of the film, given the status of American race relations today. (The same blindspot is evident in the Netflix show, Daredevil, and Mangold’s last Wolverine film, which was set in Japan.)

The Thoughtless Diversity of Logan

————– Let’s linger on that last point for a second. In Logan, an entire black family gets slaughtered onscreen. This is a black family who we already see terrorized by racist hicks for refusing to move off their farmland. We are shown that they are at the mercy of these white folks to maintain basic amenities like running water. We also see that they are often terrorized by these men WITH GUNS on what seems to be a daily basis.

White Fright; Or, Why Are There No Black People in Haunted House Movies?

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*And another tongue in cheek piece on the expectations that Black people should die in Horror movies, because that’s the tradition, and how hard it can be getting used to watching them survive these movies sometimes.

The Black Die Young: The Internal Struggle of a Black Horror Movie Fan

——–I have a secret passion; the less addicted of you might call it an addiction. I like to watch. I rent base, filthy movies and slip them into brown paper bags so no one can tell. I sit alone in seedy, near-empty theaters, pleasuring myself with this trash. I’m too embarrassed to tell anyone about my weakness, although my wife has caught me watching a time or two (“It’s a documentary!” is my standard excuse; she’s since cancelled the Discovery Channel.). But now I’m ready to step out of the shadows and proclaim loudly, I am a black man… and I love horror movies.

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*Yeah, we’re looking at you Star Wars!

Every Galaxy Needs More Than Three People of Color

———When people of color do appear in science fiction, it’s often as sidekicks or advisers. Black characters are likely to die quickly and are unlikely to ever interact with any other black characters, since many galaxies seem to contain only about three black people. That lack of representation makes it hard for people of color to imagine that their writing will ever find a home in the genre.

*I was going to finish up my review of Bladerunner 2049 with a critique of the films technical and philosophical aspects, but I think I’ll post a list of other critical apporaches to the movie, and post my viewpoint as a followup.